Being Dumped, On Television

I looked out my window last Saturday and decided it was get-in-touch-with-ex-boyfriends season. I’m not sure whether it was the cloud cover or the temperature that tipped me off, but somehow I just knew.



So, I started to work my way down the list alphabetically. I was striking out. All of the ones in A through C were married with children so getting in touch would be awkward, and probably highly inappropriate from their wives’ perspective. I needed to respect the cardinal rule of intergender friendship for single female adults of this age: thou shalt not remain friends with ex-boyfriends unless they are also single and/or gay (which leads to interpretive challenges when they are heterosexually married AND gay).



A few letters later in the alphabet, I stumbled on the Evil Englishman. We had dated sometime in the 1870s, or so it seems, and he remains single, so he is safe (possibly too safe). Some of you will recall that I had an unremarkable lunch with him a year ago, a lunch that surprised me by how little we had to say to each other.* But, a year later, maybe he had become more interesting, or I had become far less interesting so he would seem more interesting in comparison.



So, I lobbed over a short email to his work address politely asking how 2011 was treating him so far. I immediately received a “Mailer Daemon” message. I scrutinized the error message for signs of obvious falsification. Truth be known, I have drafted false email error messages in the past rather than respond to someone with whom I no longer wished to be in contact. Cowardly? Yes, yet surprisingly effective.



The error message appeared legitimate. But how could he have left the bank he’d been at for 20 years? That bank was his life and he loved those trading screens like they were his next of kin (if he could have married an algorithm, he would have, but I suspect he would’ve been disappointed with their sex life). Only an assassination could explain this, although I recognize that fixed income derivatives traders are so rarely the subject of assassination attempts these days.



I launched a formal investigation and reached out to a friend with a Bloomberg account so she could sleuth discreetly on my behalf. Bloomberg is like Facebook for traders, except that it’s essentially mandatory for those living in “real time,” like traders (lawyers tend to live in “unreal time” where they tell a client they will send a document “shortly,” only to produce it days later . . .).



If the Evil Englishman weren’t on Bloomberg then clearly the assassination theory, no matter how far-fetched, was valid. My friend typed, searched, and found . . . some odd news. Within minutes she was able to pull up a story, which had appeared just 20 minutes earlier, confirming not only that he had left his senior post but that he had learned of his own departure the day prior thereto while listening to a “breaking news” segment on CNBC. Ouch!



We’ve all heard friends’ horror stories about being dumped by voicemail or email, which stings, but being dumped on public television must be devastating, not to mention uncivilized. As far as I know, only Matt Damon has dumped someone on national television (Minnie Driver).



Guys can break up in any medium because, well, they can. They incur no legal liability in doing so. There are no laws that govern these types of transactions. It’s generally a bit tougher for banks to do this, even if an employee is “at will,” because there are reputational concerns at stake as well as potential liabilities to address.



His bank was walking away from a 20 year commitment and couldn’t even muster the decency to alert him in advance. Isn’t this something HR could have done? Maybe that’s why guys tend to break up over email and voicemail nowadays—they have no HR department to do the “in-person” job for them.



Later in the day, a spokesperson for the bank denied the story, but “Business Insider” explained that it would keep the story posted because it had been communicated to them by a “friend from work” of the Evil Englishman, which introduced a new level of indecency. Which is worse, the fact that your employer allows your termination to leak to public television through its own sloppiness before telling you, or the fact that your “work buddy” (who has inevitably been described as “collegial” and a “team player” in his 360 degree review) chose to share this delightful anecdote with the press ? What a swell friend. Left me wondering about my good friends in the corporate world, or is there such a thing . . .



How implausible that a white shoe firm that prided itself on its elitist standards for over 75 years should discard of top talent in such a crass manner. Then I recalled the Evil Englishman confiding in me a decade ago that he thought his bank was “headed to the shitter” (which sounds far less vulgar with a British accent). Had culture in corporate America, even in white shoe firms, decayed so dramatically in just a decade? Were their white shoes now muddied by greed for a quick profit, or had their shoes always been filthy but it was easier to hide a decade ago, when the Internet was still in its infancy and Wall Street press was easier to control?



Notes

* http://penelopefrost.blogspot.com/2009/11/lunch-report-x-lunch.html