I Know You Like To Think Your Ship Don't Sink

Somewhere in the New York offices of the company formerly known as Lehman Brothers, there is a conference room in dire need of some plaster. This is likely not a priority for the top Lehman brass or the government or Barclay's or whoever is now in charge of this sort of thing, but the plaster would be used to fill the numerous giant holes created when a prized six foot long scale model of a sailboat was ripped out of a wall a few days after said wall's owner declared bankruptcy.

The sailboat (along with a set of smaller replicas that had been collected with great care and appreciation by a senior member of the firm) was not the only memento of better times suddenly cast into pathetic relief by the crumbling firm and fortunes around it. Bottles of expensive wine that once served as celebratory reminders of profitable deals and rainmaker relationships were now being considered and, with shrugs, popped open and poured into styrofoam cups pilfered from the hallway kitchenettes. Little Nerf footballs emblazoned with companies taken public or merged were tossed around, mini distractions flying to and fro. Suit jackets and ties, leather notebooks, and shiny pens were dumped into boxes and tote bags and lugged outside to find themselves immortalized by curious cameras and roving reporters.

"I have no idea if I still have a job," remarks Steve, who has been at Lehman for the entirety of his career, having opted to stick around even as his friends sought greener pastures at what those in the know refer to as small PE shops. (He was out at dinner with some of these friends the night his firm declared bankruptcy. Upon hearing the news, they doubled their drink orders.) "But I'm pretty sure I'm going to be unemployed in a few weeks." He says this in a manner that is almost cheerful and not unlike the tone one takes after a particularly brutal blind date or final exam.

I've heard that tone a lot lately. Which makes sense, because: when your company is pulled out from under you like that, when it vaporizes into the air, when you sit at your desk and stare at CNBC as the stock of your respected employer ticks down, down, down (it's at one times book value right now. It can't go any lower! you think, and then you watch it tick right on through) how else can you respond? Because, really, it's not you, it's the econo-me.

Absurdities abound, and they provide relief. Patrick, of the late Bear Stearns, finds grim humor in the fact that his former company turned out to be a trendsetter: they collapsed before it was cool to do so. And in hindsight, he was lucky: paid double for several months - to entice him to stick around playing the violin while the ship went down - he's now six weeks into three months of a severance deal. It was a gentle landing. First, though, he had to endure scenarios straight out of an episode of The Office and ripped from the Ben Affleck interview scene in Good Will Hunting.

"The way it worked was, if JP Morgan offered a Bear employee a job and they turned it down, they'd forfeit all severance," Patrick recalls. "But they could offer you any job. So in some ways, you actually wanted to get laid off so you could collect the package."

Thus began a delicate dance; employees were asked to rate on a scale of 1 to 3 how strongly they wanted to work for JP Morgan. Patrick, hedging his bets, marked down a 2 and then embarked on an ambitious campaign to undersell himself. (His boss was complicit, doing his part to call buddies at the acquiring bank and declare Patrick not the right fit for their departments.)

"I wouldn't even bring a resume in to some of the interviews," Patrick recalls with a wry-but-resigned smile. "It was like when that dude meets with the consultants in Office Space. I might as well have put my feet up on the desk."

There are a lot of feet up on a lot of desks these days. Employees are told to keep reporting to work, but with assets frozen, clients fleeing, and credit crunched, what is there to do? Computer screens flicker with resumes and job search sites, but it only takes a dash of mental math to realize that this is something of a sordid exercise in supply and demand. For now, you see, these waters we navigate are raging and murky. And they'll swallow even the most well-crafted model sailboats right up.

String Quartet Tribute: Fall Out Boy - Sugar We're Going Down
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