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Cool site: See Jane Work.

Filed at 3:18 pm under Work
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I just don’t have much to post today; August is exceeding quiet, and I’ve been scheduling and rescheduling a meeting today with an incredibly busy trader who is putting out fires left and right. So I’ve just been sitting around doing not too much, and my email has even slowed to a crawl, but it’s all good. I’d rather be paid to be bored than be bored for free, right?

Tonight I’ll go home and chug on through some more work for IAM - more fun, though I am much rustier on programming than I used to be. I did manage to get a pretty solid database structure together for them this week, and I just got a script working that logs users in and out, completely with mildly-encrypted password (woohoo!). I rock, verily, and sometimes.

After doing a little more with that, taking out my trash, and finishing a logo design for another client tonight, I think I may actually break down and read for a while. My brain is performing a meltdown from lack of real use, and I need to do something that does not involve sitting in front of a screen and jabbing at little black plastic squares.

I did, however, have some lovely writing-related news yesterday, and that brightened the day up considerably. A first: a real print article. (One of the profiles from the book I contributed to - Angela’s profile, in fact - will be in the next print issue of RELEVANT, and I’ll be credited under my married name, Wilkinson) But this is an article I’ve genuinely pitched and had accepted and not had the editor just quit returning my emails. Hurrah! More details when it gets closer.

I am slowly going through my weekly routine of eating everything in my refrigerator. I cleaned out most of the vegetables yesterday, though I have three yellow tomatoes in my fridge that need eating, and still have a bit of ice cream. I also suspect that a bunch of the food in my kitchen cabinets has seen better days (a lot of it was from Tom’s kitchen, which means it was bought when he lived in Boston, which was not recent) and need chucking.

Things have started disappearing from our wedding regstries! (Shameless plug 1 and 2.) We got the first one yesterday from some awesome friends:

We also have several wine goblets and the ice cream maker, which is good news for the future Wilkinson family. Tom is as in love with ice cream as I am with pizza, so now he can get it whenever he wants. Experimentation is the name of the game.

Lastly, the dude who made this hat has my utmost respect.

Call me a cold New Yorker, and then please, please, stop standing in the middle of the sidewalk.

Filed at 4:42 pm under New York City, Daily Goings-On, Work, Wedding
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Over dinner, at a goofy little French place in the neighborhood, he asks how I got into advertising . . .
“It started as a day job”, I say. I tell him that I thought I’d write plays or novels or appliance manuals at night. But advertising made my I.Q. go down; every night I had to work to get it back up to regular.

Melissa Bank, in Zoetrope: All Story

Filed at 11:01 am under Life, Work
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As of today, I’ve been at Bank of America for a year. Woohoo.

Filed at 11:25 am under Work
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My boss just sent me a HUGE bouquet of orchids, roses, and other white flowers for an engagement congrats. Awww!

Filed at 10:51 am under Work, Engagement
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I’m in Chicago, and have been since yesterday. And it’s a nice city. The people are nice. When they bump into you on the street, they turn and apologize. The baristas in Starbucks are eerily peppy. And everyone wears jeans on Fridays in these offices.

But truly, there’s no place like home. (I miss New York. And I miss Tom.)

Filed at 1:23 pm under New York City, Travel, Work
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Saw Chris Thile at the Living Room last night. He was awesome. How many guys can totally rock out a Radiohead song one minute, and play a Bach partita the next minute, all on solo mandolin?

I am exhausted.

Tomorrow morning I have to get up arond 4:00 am and get myself to La Guardia (thank God for expense accounts) and fly off to Chicago for two days of meetings. Then I’ll fly from there to my parents’ house near Albany (ironically, cheaper than flying back to New York) and spend the weekend there. My brother is turning 17 on Sunday, and there’s Mother’s Day. I feel old.

Filed at 8:32 am under New York City, Music, Travel, Work
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Tom and I send a lot of emails back and forth with links and other random things (though Google Calendar has helped greatly in cutting down the “when were we going to that?” emails). So he decided we should pick a subject line each day, since Gmail handily files emails under the same subject line on the same day. (We are googlophiles.)

Today’s subject line: “Wubber Boots”.

It just makes me giggle inside.

In other, more grown-up news, I now have a functioning BlackBerry in my possession, and I know how to use it. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Filed at 1:56 pm under Funnies, Work
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Observation: the workday goes much faster when it is busy and stressful.

Remind me why I’m not a journalist?

Filed at 1:05 pm under Work
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I write to you from the windy city, somewhere down on South LaSalle and not the Sears Tower (where the rest of the Chi-town BofA operations are). It’s supremely laid-back here, and people are even wearing jeans. I’m dressed-down for New York and dressed-up for Chicago. Go figure.

Hopping in a cab in an hour or so to get back to O’Hare and on a plane to New York. I seem to have pulled a muscle in my back. It hurts to sit, it hurts to stand, it hurts to walk. C’est la vie.

Filed at 3:33 pm under Travel, Work
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Well, I’m going to Chicago for the day next Thursday. Hurrah for business travel. I have a very low opinion of flights in and out of Chicago - seriously, it seems like they’re never on time, and despite having never been there, I’ve been forced into flying through other airports because of the weather - so I’m hoping that I will not get stuck overnight.

The bright side - it’s another pushpin for my (as yet theoretical) “cities I’ve visited” map!

Filed at 12:22 pm under Travel, Work
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I write to you today from 50 Rockefeller Plaza, also known as the AP building (in which the Associated Press apparently does not reside anymore). ‘Tis the land of the free and the home of mobs of tourists.

But, the commute is shorter, and there are definite perqs. Plus I have a semi-cube that I share with a co-worker, with lots and lots of desk space and half-height cube walls. Woohooo.

I have a lot to do. Ciao for now.

Filed at 3:39 pm under Work
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Ahhh, commuting.

The threatened MTA transit strike is looking more and more likely, which basically means there will be no subway service. If they strike, they’ll stop working at midnight tonight. (Note to self: make sure to be home by midnight.)

The Bank has put together a contingency shuttle plan, which is great, but I can only imagine how mobbed it will be with all the investment bankers who simply MUST be here, plus support personnel, plus techies . . . it picks up relatively far from my apartment (5th and 14th) and drops off at Rockefeller Center, which is all well and good but is about eight blocks from work. Whatever.

On top of it, tomorrow is supposed to be our last day at the 9 West 57th Street offices, but we have to pack our stuff up tonight just in case. (We move to 50 Rockefeller Plaza next week.)

AND - they are forecasting ice and snow for tonight. Which is going to make the above-ground commuting of millions of extra people just that much more fun! </sarcasm>

Filed at 12:07 pm under New York City, Work, Facepalm
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So the last couple weeks at work have been uncharacteristically busy, as I got sort of fed up with the many people who had their fingers in a certain process (thereby exponentially increasing the potential for human error, and making it very difficult to figure out where problems occur) - so I volunteered to take over the WHOLE process.

It’s nothing I would need a degree for. In fact, most people could do this. But if they want to pay me for it, that’s cool. It’s really just a short-term busy-ness, as when a backlog of curiously ignored things gets fixed up, it slows down to daily maintenance.

Anyhow, it reminded me of the one truly useful thing I remember from training. Someone (I don’t remember who) was addressing mostly the investment bankers among us at training. He said that the most important thing a new hire could do is make themselves the “go-to” guy on the desk; to be the one that people call because they know that you’ll be thorough and get the job done and reply to your emails and return your calls. So I’ve tried to be that, even though I don’t work on a trading desk, and it’s working. I feel useful!

Filed at 4:42 pm under Work
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I don’t feel ready to talk about all that went on this weekend, but big changes are happening in my life. They are scary and large but I believe God’s hand is in them.

On a more frivolous note, they are putting Christmas lights up on the trees outside my office. This has been a small source of happiness to me each day. They’re just so pretty.

Also, it is nearly 70 degrees out today. Welcome to November.

Speaking of November, NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) starts today, which means before I go to sleep tonight I need to write about 2,000 words of a novel. I’m still a bit plotless. The things I think of would make a good photograph or film, but not so much a novel. So I guess I’ll just dive in and start writing.

And lastly, I am the new online editor of the career & finance section of Relevant. Let’s hope this is another step in the writing ladder.

Filed at 4:17 pm under Life, Daily Goings-On, Writing, Work
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Today = busiest day thus far.

Jonny got on an airplane in Albany at 7 this morning with his mom to head Dublin-ward. I amextremely excited for him. This is such an amazing opportunity.

Back here at “home” in New York, I realized at 6:30 am that I meant to get up at 6 and rushed through morning preparations for a long day. I headed to the Andreades’ apartment on the other side of the park for the “girls group” (involving banana pancakes, coffee, giggling, and prayer) and then up to work.

I’m now here and presented with 352 overdue enrollment requests that nobody bothered to give me until now and they have to be done Absolutely Immediately. Plus some applciation work. The good news is that, due to a random brainwave yesterday, my prototype is suddenly functioning a lot more like it should, making my chances of meeting my Thursday deadline much greater. Keeping all appendages crossed.

I will probably chug on outta here around 1, after my noon conference call, and make my way to Penn station. My parents were very happy to pick me up from the train and bring me over to RPI, which accomplishes both seeing them and not having to figure out how to get a cab to Troy from Rensselaer.

On the train I want to do some reading, but I realized that I never worked on my presentation for this evening. So if I don’t get a chance to do it before I leave work today, I’ll have to do it on the train, sans laptop (oh boy!). Then I can read.

Speaking of books, I finished Liar’s Poker on the train back on Sunday. I really, really enjoyed it. You’d think a book about bond traders in the 80s would be unspeakably dull, but the writing was superb and made the story understandable and enjoyable. Anybody who can induce people other than i-bankers to be interested in mortgage-backed securities deserves some respect. The language was a bit rough (which anyone who’s ever attended college will not blink at) but otherwise, I really recommend it, even if you think finance is the dullest subject ever, of which you would not be too far off the mark.

I’m now about to start Into Thin Air, about a trek up Mt. Everest (or so they tell me). I would never probably choose to read the book except Jonny keeps raving about it, so he bought it and I’m going to read it. I usually read books on my longer-distance trips (to and from Albany) so I imagine it will be done by the time I get back from Dublin next weekend.

Brendan, bless his heart, gave me a subscription to the New Yorker for graduation, which is awesome. I love getting it in my mailbox every Monday and having the issue a week before it hits newstands. I usually bring that on the subway since those rides are short (about 15 minutes), just long enough to finish a shorter article or half a longer one.

Right so, I’m driving back with the other BAS recruiter tonight into the city, and ideally we’ll be back before midnight though I don’t know how likely that is. I will work all day tomorrow and then go to French class - w00t! (Incidentally, I don’t think l33tsp34k translates to other languages. Blast.)

And oh, happy day. I will be in church on Sunday down here.

Filed at 9:58 am under Books, Work
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Yesterday was the three-month anniversary of my move to New York City. I think I can safely say that life has gotten significantly busier. And certainly intriguing.

I went back to Albany this weekend. Spent time with college friends, my parents, and Jonny. He’s leaving early tomorrow morning for Dublin - and I follow for the weekend in two weeks! Never been to Europe before. Note to self: check for passport.

This week promises to be a bit wild & wooly. I think I’ll be working a long day today in order to try and work out (or perhaps squash) the bugs in my application, since the prototype is due on Thursday. Tomorrow I’ll leave the office after my noon meeting to catch a train to Albany. I have the info session at RPI tomorrow night and will drive back the same evening with the other recruiting lead - no trains late enough. I’ll work on Wednesday and Thursday (interspersed with French class), and leave early Friday morning for Troy again to work at the career fair on Friday & Saturday . . . hopefully bumping into some friends in the interim who are also going to be in Troy.

I think I’ll come back here Saturday night so as to be at church on Sunday. Sadly, the cable internet dude has to come and fix our internet sometime Sunday afternoon, so either Katie or I will be tied down to the apartment.

Relevant mentioned an interest in more articles, so I wrote one on the train on Friday evening. I have to re-read it tonight before I send it to them. I’m a little skeptical about how good it is, but the always-patient Jonny is reading it for me with critiques and sending it back today. Stay tuned.

Right, so I guess I’ll be here late tonight unless I get more done. Ciao all. Leave comments.

Filed at 11:03 am under Daily Goings-On, Work
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Autumn seems to be very reluctant to arrive here. It’s been in the 80s - which, granted, is much better than the summer was, but I’m used to fall weather by now. I guess it will be uncomfortably cold soon enough. I hope we don’t skip autumn altogether.

I got back late Sunday night and collapsed. I was tired after having stayed up late with friends in Troy on Saturday night and getting up early for church on Sunday. Katie was there when I got back - turned out she’d been upstate on Sunday, though not far enough to where I would consider it “upstate”. Growing up in Albany distorts your view of these things.

Yesterday was a normal day at work, except it was more busy than usual. I actually stayed past 5pm, trying to finish some things up. This application that I’m developing is moving along, but since I’m essentially adapting and customizing code, certain things aren’t working - like, for no apparent reason, all the text in the program is transparent. You can see right through it to whatever’s behind it. And this will not be acceptable.

I’ll figure it out.

Last night I had coffee with two girls from work and one who I met through her boyfriend, a co-worker. We had a lot of fun. I really rarely spent time just hanging out with girls in college, and now that’s most of my social time. It’s a bit bizarre to me, really, but I’m finding myself (shockingly!) enjoying it. Who woulda thunk it?

It looks like I will be spending a lot of time at RPI next week. Next Tuesday night is the Banc of America Securities information session for people interested in the company, and I think I will be going up for that. Then the NSBE/SHPE Career Fair at RPI is all day on Friday and Saturday, and I’m definitely going for that. A couple of my good friends from college who graduated with me are trekking to Troy and we are planning crazy times - or at least getting together.

Tonight is gym and catch-up time . . . French starts tomorrow. (Back to school!)

Filed at 11:08 am under Daily Goings-On, Work
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Yes! I’m still alive.

We spent the mornings last week learning about all kinds of financial instruments that the Bank offers its clients, and the afternoons taking a crash course (essentially the basic first-year MBA class) in corporate finance. The corporate finance professor teaches at NYU and was excellent. I learned a lot from him about why things happen the way they do in business. The week ended with a bang, with four exams in one week and rather poor scores on my part.

To my complete and utter relief, our recruiter told the technology people that our scores were not being sent to our managers. These next three weeks, on the other hand, count much more vitally towards our first impressions. This week is bond math, and to be honest, it’s really pretty easy so far. I either have learned this stuff beforehand or the concepts are simple (or Excel spreadsheets can do the function for you). Also, we don’t have homework yet.

In addition to the coursework, we are playing trading simulation games in class to learn about what the global markets people (who we will be supporting) do and how they work. This should, in theory, help us to develop better products.

Aside from that, life has been pretty good. Jonny spent the weekend in New York, and we did all kinds of fun things (food shopping, cooking, watching movies, and such).

Also, I joined the gym yesterday. Today I went for the first time. I joined Equinox at 50th & Broadway, which is just barely past Times Square. I was delighted when I realized that my office is actually literally in the building on top of the gym, and the subway comes out right there too. Quite convenient. The gym itself is beautiful - clean, friendly staff, and very sort of spa-like (in fact, it has a spa in it). I went there this evening and took one of the classes (kind of a pilates/yoga fusion thing) and really enjoyed it. So, that is good.

It’s been almost unbearably humid here - the air is thick and it’s hard to breathe - so waiting for the subway is about ten times worse. But, the good thing about living in the north is that you can find it in your heart to enjoy the heat, since you know that in about six weeks it will start getting cold again . . .

Adieu!

Filed at 9:11 pm under Life, Daily Goings-On, Work
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So yes, today was the first day of work.

It went well! We have six weeks of training initially with all the new hires from all the offices (New York, Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, and London). A bunch of people that were at my interviews were also there, which was great, and I met some other really nice people.

The commute was very uneventful. I left the house shortly after 7:00 am, and was in Times Square by 7:20 am. I didn’t have to be there until 7:45 am, so I went to Starbucks, got a cup of tea, and watched the people walk by until it was time to go in.

We spent most of the day filling out forms, picking up laptops, and finding out what is expected of us. I was finished at 3pm. I walked to the bank on the way home - I’m still sort of shocked at the experience of having everything so close by, after living in the country for years. We are training at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Times Square, so it’s a very convenient location - if a bit crowded.

The rest of this week will include learning all about accounting. Tomorrow night is a reception at the famous Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center for all of us. That should be cool.

One task I have to accomplish soon is joining a gym. There are four or five good gyms in the immediate area. I just have to find one that will be clean, safe, and affordable (easier said than done in New York City!). I have my eye on the Greenwich Ave Equinox, which looked really beautiful when I walked by yesterday. If I can afford it, I probably will. It’s worth cutting spending in other areas to be able to take good classes, swim, lift, and run - a nice thing to do before or after work.

Filed at 7:45 pm under Work
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