The Last Job That Piqued My Interest

I won’t kid you but there are downs to the ups of retiring in material comfort.  There is, for example, the tendency to see more frequent, more dire, health issues and if not with you than certainly with people you know.  The latter can be source of stress and sadness. It can also be a source of comfort in that it’s not you who has fill-in-the-blank, but such is a fleeting comfort because you know you’re on what golfers I understand call ‘the back nine.’

And if they don’t call it that the fact you’re now entering the final phase, screw it, I’ll use the term.  It’s one of the good things about retiring; you can get away with stuff.

But as usual I digress, another allowance I indulge.  

I was cleaning up old papers and came across a letter I wrote in 1978 to someone I knew in the CIA about a job.  I was on my way to Vienna that fall and thought, heck, maybe they recruit early and could use naivete in some way.  A courier I thought, not knowing what a courier really did, but I had a good imagination and hadn’t smoked marijuana in the preceding months so I made the ideal candidate.

My first assignment was mundane enough; counting the sagging freight cars traveling into a Budapest trainyard and calculating the percentage that left no longer sagging.  This related to something to do with iron ore going into production at a specific factory. 

That’s not true, by the way.  I never did get such an assignment.  Nor was I tasked with executing ex-Nazis, though that was a reasonable idea there being a lot of ex Nazis around Vienna at the time.  No, what I just wrote was what I told someone I think was a recruiter who seemed amused at my desire for a secret-agent internship, that’s how I described it, and asked for my ideas on what I thought I might actually do.  I never got the internship and my legacy with the Agency has been relayed elsewhere.

But I found a copy of my letter to the Agency from the spring of 1978 and shredded it along with other private papers.  I wonder what if.

Included in that stack was a job description I got quite recently from a friend in Boston.  He had been a portfolio manager and once, when I was quaking over getting my first serious role at Greenwich, he advised that people in the business were slightly above average compared to the population as a whole, slightly more ambitious, definitively more greedy, and erroneously thought themselves in the upper 1% of humanity.  “You’ll kick ass,” he told me.  “You really are smarter.”  He was right on all scores other than my kicking anyone’s ass. 

The job was one he thought I’d be interested in, “Head of Investor Insights” at a Boston institution.  The description included such buzzwords as ‘Head of Thought Leadership’, timely research, media appearances (ever the ham I am), by-lined articles and co-chair of the Global Editorial Board whatever that is.

And the job? “You are a talented and strategic individual.” That’s me!
One who delivers institutional-quality content with a high degree of technical knowledge. Right up my alley!

The job calls for a strong command of global financial and investment industry topics as well as the competitive landscape. Two out of three ain’t bad. Your passion will be evident through your proven ability to tell stories. I ask you, could there be a better fit?

For a moment, not a brief one either, I toyed with it.  Boston still seems like home, undoubtedly a big income, attention, relevance and doing the story of big-picture story telling I still enjoy.  I think the market turmoil of the last several weeks got me going again on having a view of things, something to say.  Still, the job in itself was one that if I could have waved a wand during the final days of CRT or during the sleepwalk of Informa (theirs, not mine) I would have jumped at

And so I got to thinking about what working does offer, and sort of kicked myself (maybe that was the ass-kicking I missed in my career) for having opted out earlier than most.  It was, by far, the most interesting job that came my way in many years or so I said to myself.

I applied through informal channels and waited.  And waited.   I’m still waiting. I tried to make contact with the relevant parties though held back on “You do realize I was #1 for 12 years in a row?!?”  I never did hear, though my buddy who made the intro has subsequently advised.  “Mate, you’re a 61-year old white male.  I think they wanted a woman.”

Well, who doesn’t want a woman, but that’s not relevant here.  What’s relevant is that I took it in stride.  The political correctness of it, if accurate, pisses me off but I’m on those back nine, right, and I just don’t have the temperament to get too upset especially since the market’s had such a nice bounce off the recent, to be revisited, lows and it wasn’t money that really interested me in the job anyway.

What interested me was a sense that if I were working maybe it would slow the aging process.  If I were relevant in a market sense, maybe this myeloma thing would creep into the background, as if the coincidence of retirement (guilt) and the diagnosis (fear) were somehow connected.  But, too, I realize that my job now, full- time job, is to stay healthy and optimistic, because nothing else will kill myeloma cells better than a good attitude. That advice was given to me by another Boston friend who has myeloma and so should know about these things. 

My job is also to pursue those things that being stuck in an high-up office overlooking Boston Harbor, as if they’d give me such a prime space, would conjure up when I’d be spying with my Zeiss binoculars birds diving into a bluefish blitz or the Rhodes 19s from the Courageous Sailing Club heeling over and me thinking, “I’d rather be out there.”  Thing is you see, I’m out there already.

I wish the woman who gets the job the very best. 

Bitch.