Anyway, I have a couple of pics for you today, with a particular nod to my old colleagues and associates... You need to be in a cave in outer Mongolia to be unaware that financial times are bad these days, but there is one long-suffering profession that has been in terminal decline for a lot longer than the current cycle of crunching credit: Spot Foreign Exchange voice broking.
Ravaged by the machines (that do a significantly better job of matching buyers and sellers), their numbers have dwindled to a mere smattering of the hard-nosed, hard-drinking, handfuls-of-cash-waving hordes that swarmed The City in the heady days of the ERM. I'm not sure I'll miss the hollow-friendship banter and bravado, but I will miss the playground nicknames: 'Scampi', 'Cheddar', 'Lurch', 'Screamer', and so many more I have forgotten. It was like living in a Bash Street Kids comic strip on a daily basis.
Extremely rare image of spot monkey reading a newspaper while commuting to work...
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Extremely rare image of monkey reading a newspaper after a hard day in the jungle...
To view previous Phriday Photos, click here!
9 comments:
I prefer the real monkey
@nursey - Good choice. Probably less mess at mealtimes.
And what a timely subject matter for the photos!!
Yesterday, for the first time in recent memory, the very screen-based number crunchers responsible for the voice brokers' demise completely collapsed, globally, for over 90 minutes! Something to do with a comms ciruit being replaced. Or someone puking in the keyboard of his workstation in Tokyo after a dodgy puffer fish salad. Possibly.
No matter, it was an absolutely marvellous throwback to the days where voice brokers ruled and where good dealers needed ears and a good spoofing voice a lot more than needing to know which button to press and which screen to watch!!
Algorithmic programmers from Harvard to Havant screamed "there are no new integers, where's my data WHERE'S MY DATA!!!" in ever diminishing cirlces (until they self combusted. Maybe they've since proved how the universe started?).
Meanwhile old farts like me got busy smashing it around in the voice brokers and loving the beumsed looks on the faces of the younger screen educated crew.
(Strangely, the oldest, fartiest member of my team, who's been in Forex since before even voice brokers were even invented, didn't remove his feet from the desk or his eyes from the Zeitung....)
What a fab 90 mins!
The only thing missing to make it a complete 1995 revival was some ex Chemical bank bloke sitting at a Japanese bank trying to take me on in DemYen and getting ironed out. He's gone off to do some interweb thingy apparently. Shame, he'd have dusted off the telephones for this...
@UDH boy - There you go, enjoying yourself again. It'll only end in tears you know!
Does sound a bit like the good-old days for a brief spell before someone put another 50p in the Matching Meter. Don't know about "getting ironed out" though...
Speaking of scores the sun is shining very hard so I think 9 holes is in order.....
You can tell how much I was enjoying the memory of those 90 minutes. My grammar and prose looked very FVJ-esque.
Back to reality with a bump today sadly, but at least eBay still works....
Why stop at 9? Play 27!
@UDH - careful, you don't want to pick up bad post-O-level English habits from FVJ.
I just did the 18 in the end. There was a slight chill in the late afternoon Sun, and the clubhouse fire and a cask-drawn Spitfire ale proved too much for my feeble resolve.
What's that you say? Non-farm payrolls? Doesn't mean that much to us down on the farm...
that is one intelligent monkey in pic 1 the other is less so reading a red top and wearing ridiculous tube travelling wear... my!! some folk could learn a lot from our primate ancestors ;-)
ha! cave in outer mongolia indeed! i can attest to the fact that, even out there, i felt the heat of the recession. but i didn't bargain when offered a cell phone case made of squirrel. purchased for the princely sum of $3.25. i'll put a snap of it up on my blog.
@randompom - while I agree wholeheartedly that we have much to learn from our hairy cousins, I suspect that there are some people who are just beyond teaching ;-)
@patsou - I only used 'Mongolia' to check if you were reading :-) Intrigued to learn what $3.25 buys you in the tree-rat accessory department...
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