The Rat Race

I should have posted some kind of report days ago, but this office-hours thing eats up a lot of time. Admittedly not as much as for nearly every other office worker in this city, given the commute -- I can't tell you how grateful I am that the Woking/Winnersh people were so fucking dilatory -- but still quite a bit. The remainder has been taken up by (insufficient) exercise, the usual demands of boyfriend, family, etc, and not nearly enough sleep, so blogging has been on the back burner -- the odd bit of spam comment deletion and not much else.

This weekend Ian is in Estonia and I've had, basically, not a single demand on my time. Bliss.

Well, other than the Olympics.

I'm not a sports fan in general, but I love the Olympics. Partly because it seems to have such a party atmosphere, and partly because it's the only time we ever get coverage of sports that are actually fun to watch. The rest of the time, in the UK at least, it's wall-to-wall football, cricket and rugby, all of which I hate. If they showed, say, synchronised diving every weekend it would be a different story.

Yesterday afternoon there was the men's trampoline competition (I was hoping the BBC might deign to show the whole thing on one of their extra coverage channels, which didn't happen, but they did screen the final), plus cycling and the last of the swimming; today there's the first batch of gymnastic apparatus finals, starting with my personal favourite, the men's floor. As I think I've mentioned before, you can't beat a good tumble.

Last night I caught a glimpse of not only Alastair and his friend Jon but also Zachary and his friend Julia. I trust Zack was suitably mortified. We wound up at The Yard, which was hateful, and then I had to flee, lest the urge to burn the whole of Soho to the ground get the better of me. I was never that much of a scene queen to begin with, but nowadays I find bars positively unbearable. Still, it's useful to be reminded of that every now and then, and the company was good.

Anyway, I was supposed to be talking about work. I know you're on tenterhooks.

This is the first time I've started a new job -- a real one, in an alien environment with completely new people -- for the best part of a decade, and it's a weird experience. They're all perfectly nice, of course, but everything's a bit tentative at the moment, and serious and businesslike, which is not something you could say about most of my previous employment. It's going to take a few weeks to find my feet.

At the moment I'm immersed in the company's training programme, learning their main pieces of software, the economic/statistical/mathematical theory underpinning it, and the whole business environment I've suddenly become a clueless part of. If nothing else, I know a fuck of a lot more about the investment management game than I did a week ago.

This is good and bad. The maths is well within my capabilities (if only because the most abstruse bits are a closely-guarded trade secret they're not about to reveal to the likes of me, draconian confidentiality agreement notwithstanding) and I'm enjoying that side of things. The software is clever, if unæsthetic, and it has been interesting learning that too. It's rather specialised and, as so often in this kind of vertical market (see, I'm talking businessy already), not at all designed with the casual user in mind.

The world of investment management, on the other hand, isn't really grabbing me. There's a fair bit of domain-specific knowledge I have to acquire, and while some is genuinely interesting, much seems pointless and arbitrary, just a lot of accreted jargon whose only purpose is to keep the punters from knowing too much about what's going on. Of course, that's the case in most fields. No doubt once I've been properly assimilated this stuff will seem perfectly reasonable, but in the meantime there have been moments when its monotony has combined with not having had enough sleep (due to new job anxiety, I think) to leave me nodding off at my desk.

So far, though, the balance is positive, and I expect that to increase as I get to grips with things. I'm sleeping better now, for a start.
Posted by matt at August 22, 2004 01:42 PM