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Wednesday 1st April, around Bank station, a bit after lunch time..
I thought I knew our enemies...
We've been watching Sky News a long time..
We are out-numbered by anarchist protestors...
But, City boys have a strength that cannot be measured; if you're listening to this, you are the Resistance.

Given that the dress code thing (even with the "trainers" update) didn't seem secure enough to ensure the safety of the staff, the building is now entering into a proper lock down. Only "mission critical" staff are to come to work and the number of emails floating around advising us to arrive early enough (at least while the protestors are still in bed), to have lunch at the canteen (and not outside), not to talk to journalists, etc is unprecedented...

Given that myself, as well as countless City (Finance) people, need to go to work even when the world leaders are gathering for fun to talk about the economy, last week we received an email from our "Emergency Response, Business Continuity Plan" team (yes, Investment Banks do have that sort of thing), saying that in order not to be assaulted by angry protestors (who will be in high concentration in the neighborhood of our building) during the three days of the G20 summit, we were invited not to dress smart as usual, but to dress "casual"; from 1st to 3rd April.

I thought that was amusing but didn't give any particular other thoughts to it. But today they went one step further, sent another email, and made it a world wide company policy to wear some jeans at least on the 1st of April.

Whatever happens, I have to take my camera with me on Wednesday. I need to have the Greenpeace folks take some pictures of me (in jeans) throwing things at the policemen, before I get into the office. Those three days are going to be sooo much fun, I can't wait (^.^)

The last three videos (interview of Cramer by Stewart) are simply amazing !

To remember for the future: very bad idea it is to give your home phone number to your boss. They actually store it and then, good lord(!), use it :-)

... anyway, it worked better than Aubrey's alarm clock.

Amid the global post credit crunch financial breakdown, a team of elite designers and managers from all around the world met in London in a cold week of January to dream of and plan the future of trading system design.

... now I feel I could sleep for few days in a row, I have never been in such an intense week-long gathering in my life.

( The title of the entry comes from the last game that we did... )

I was well on my way to spend the day in bed, helping traders by doing some work on my production server from under my covers, when I got a phone call from the International Head of Global Markets IT about some design workshop next week I am due to attend (looks like I will become a part of the elite System Design Intelligencia group at the bank -- where did it all go wrong for me ?). I then had to turn up at work (around lunch time) which turned out to be a good thing because I then had various unplanned meeting during the afternoon among which an Audit meeting. It's the third time already over the last 6 months that I get audited, but unlike the two previous audits which lasted only one week, I feel that this one will last for a while, the time for the Auditors to clear up all the logical access of Hypercube... Being audited is one of the fun things about working in Finance. Anyway, I have to go to work tomorrow Saturday to get few things sorted and fill some paperwork before not coming back for one week...

The sentence "time is money" has never seemed as true as one time I was talking to our Heath and Safety Officer in the Bank. A nice charming lady whose job is to make sure that we will all survive various cataclysmic events, including being sat improperly on your chair...

Sometimes, she has to organize fire drills and make sure that people know where is the meeting point next to the Thames. She tends to do this per department, or floor (when it has to be a big event). Sometimes the trading floor in involved and everyone has to leave. When the trading floor is evacuated, the traders are out of their desks for about 20 minutes in the middle of the day, and then is it simple: the bank loses millions (for spending 20 minutes not monitoring the market -- or for not answering phone calls). That's why trading floor fire drills tend not to happen very often.

Today there's been a mistake done by someone in IT, a Microsoft patch release which should have happened Sunday night at 3am, started at 3pm this afternoon. The patch itself didn't occur, but all PCs in the building in London have been logged out (not in New York on Hong Kong I noticed, because their IE kept pinging Hypercube). I then wondered how much money did we lose in the few minutes that it took all the traders to log in and restart all their trading applications... Probably not much, but certainly more than this guy's annual salary.

Talking about market volatility ? There you go...