When I was 22, my ultimate boss struck me as a nasty piece of work, but now here he was waving at me amiably from across the room. What had happened? asks Lucy Kellaway.
IN MY HEAD is a dull ache and in my handbag a stack of business cards. One is from an acupuncturist. Another from a racehorse trainer, and further cards from asset managers, venture capitalists and people who are presidents of companies bearing their own name. It was quite a party.
The evening started in the way that the best ones often do: with a feeling of dread. This was the annual get-together of the alumni of JPMorgan, thus combining the two most dismal types of social function: reunions and networking events.
As I cycled along the Thames to the Festival Hall, I thought: (a) I won't know anyone, as I quit the bank 25 years ago; (b) my JPMorgan days were an unhappy part of my life that is irrelevant to me now; and (c) there really must be less painful ways of finding things to write about.
It didn't start well. "I know who you are," said the first person I met in a crowded room. His badge told me he still worked for the bank and he didn't look terribly friendly. There was an article I had written eight years ago, he said, that was based on many misconceptions that he would now like to correct.
Over his shoulder I surveyed the room: a mass of men in suits and women in suits. They looked annoyingly young in the way that the exceedingly affluent tend to - and they also looked pretty lively.
This could have been because most of them no longer work for JPMorgan, or because men in white jackets were topping up every champagne glass each time a sip was taken.
Walter Gubert, European head of JPMorgan, stood up to welcome everyone. "This party keeps on getting bigger and better," he declared. A former banker hissed to me: that's because people keep on leaving.
Judging by the number of them in the room, women keep on leaving more than most. The first one I spoke to told me that she left because the job was making her cry. I said banking had made me cry too, and my tears were a mixture of boredom and fear of making further enormous mistakes on foreign exchange deals.
Hers, she said were frustration. She was a managing director, and said she had had enough of the bullshit. Now she teaches at business school, is a venture capitalist and sheds fewer tears.
Other women told me that they had "had a blast" at the bank. However, for one, the blast delivered by 14-hour days turned out to be too much and she now makes a living by sticking long pins in people instead. Over her head, I glimpsed the weirdly unchanged face of a man I used to have nightmares about.
When I was 22, my ultimate boss struck me as a nasty piece of work, but now here he was waving at me amiably from across the room. What had happened? Had he mellowed? Had I?
I had hardly recovered from this before I saw another of my former demons. In 1982, an American woman had taken me to one side and told me that I looked too young and should "never wear pants". I found this traumatic partly as I thought she was instructing me not to wear underwear, but mostly because it's not nice being told you look like a baby when you think you look sophisticated.
But here she was, happily laughing at the whole thing, and - most gratifyingly - wearing pants herself. I was so moved I forgot to ask her why she had left.
I did ask another banker, a man who seemed at the time to be a dyed-in-the-wool Morgan Man. "I have a rule," he explained. "No assholes." So why did you come to the party, I asked. "Because there are so many great people here." This was a bit confusing. Maybe he had had too much champagne.
Or maybe I had. Indeed, the next thing I knew I was throwing my arms around a tall man with a thick dark beard who looked exactly as he had done 27 years ago on the first day of our training programme. He said he had lasted almost two decades, but now worked for a competitor.
Eyes shining, he reminded me of an evening when all trainees (nine men and me) had got terribly drunk and rolled back to a houseboat on the Thames where one of them was living. The others, he recalled, made their way home, whereas I had turned up at work the next morning apparently in the same clothes as the day before. The memory was alarming. More so was the fact that he still seemed curious 26 years later about what had happened that night.
I broke away to join a group of bankers who had each spent more than a decade at JPMorgan. One now owns nine race horses, and most of the others were fund managers or consultants. All claimed to be deliriously happy. This may be because anything is better than working at a big bank; or it may be you only go back to your former employers to show that you are doing better without them.
A little gaggle of hedge fund stars in a corner were doing this particularly effectively, looking swanky and causing much resentment among the comparative paupers who had not jumped ship. As I got my coat, I realised I had got it all wrong. That part of my life may have been weird, but it was not an irrelevance. Working with people does create a bond, and that bond lasts.
I also learnt two other useful things that night: (a) working lives are quite boring, and so anything resembling a scandal will be remembered forever, and (b) it is possible to be really successful in banking and have a beard. - (Financial Times service)
