The first job I had on the trading floor was with a little outfit called Index Futures.
I was a runner in the grain room. I proudly wore a gray trading jacket with yellow piping on the lapel. I was a snot-nosed kid trying to figure out where my life was pointed. I worked alongside a guy named Hank. Back then, I didn’t have the words for it, but looking back now, Hank was almost certainly on the spectrum. He was a smart kid who was just wired a little differently.
The desk was run by three guys in their early thirties who thought they were wolves, but really, they were assclowns. They picked on Hank and tried to shove me around too. I remember thinking... How are these grown men still acting like eighth graders?
One Saturday, my Oldman and I sat down for breakfast at the diner in downtown Oak Park, right across from the bank. I told him I was ready to quit. I could easily find another job on the floor.
Before I could finish the sentence, he shut that idea down.
That was when the father part kicked in. He told me something I didn’t want to hear but needed to:
Anywhere you go in life, you are going to run into a brown-noser, a backstabber, someone who talks tough but folds quick. There will always be a prick with no integrity and a selfish agenda.
You don’t run from that.
You learn how to handle it.
You learn how to carry yourself around it.
So I stayed.
I stopped taking any nonsense from those thirty-something “adults.” I kept an eye on Hank and in time, those three jagoffs were gone. I built a life down there, a career, a name. Hank stayed on the floor for a long time. He passed a couple years back. I think about him more than I expected I would.
Funny thing about age: a thirty-two-year-old once looked like a grown man to me. Now I know they were just kids who hadn’t figured out how to act yet either.
Here is the lesson today, Chalkheads...
...You don’t always get to choose the room, but you damn sure get to choose the way you stand in it.
My neighborhood woke up to the first snowfall this morning. Just a dusting, but enough to remind us winter doesn’t ask permission. If you need a soundtrack for a November Monday morning like this, cue up Gordon Lightfoot. Might as well feel the season and recall those twenty-nine lives.
And tomorrow, get your flag out. It is Armistice Day.
Lest we forget.
