Eff Seven

I had the misfortune - as I began a comment piece that eventually trailed off into the kind of rubbish that even MySpace would think twice before allowing to be posted - of visiting Canary Wharf today. I attended the final round of interviews for Morgan Stanley, a towering financial instution which despite its standing in the world is just as full of uncaring idiots as the next towering City building. The application process is so contrived and full of reverse-psychology-mindgames that the only reason I went to today’s session was so that I could say I’d finally been to London’s financial heart, and after two hours being patronised into next year I can happily say that the only time I plan to go back there is with a force of rebels and the testicles of whoever happens to be Head of State at the time.

There are a lot of reasons why I’m not a fan of the financial sector when it comes to job options. First of all, I find the idea of working from eight in the morning until New York decides to get their arses out of bed doing database support the very definition of ‘Not What I Signed Up For’, and I know that sounds arrogant and holier-than-thou, but I spent most of today studying how compilers work and the difficulty of programming for multi-core computers without causing system failures and how to understand XKCD comics, and if an employer can’t find a better application of my four years of knowledge than to put me in front of code and ask me to make it work faster then it does sort of make me wonder why I bother coming in every day.

Secondly, the financial sector itself doesn’t really sit right with me. I’ve got parents who have spent decades working parallel to an organisation called the Financial Standards Authority - be that in advisory roles, standards compliance, etc - and while I find this kind of ‘normal’ financial work completely necessary, it takes on a different meaning when you’re standing in a circle of giant steel-and-glass erections talking to a man who earns in a few months what it has cost me to pay for my entire University education. At that point the thought of professors and research assistants who spend months scraping together enough money to research technology that could save or improve millions of lives while some idiot spends the same amount of money in five minutes deciding he wants to walk past a different kind of tree on his way to work really begins to get on my metaphorical tits.

Now it just so happens at the moment that the course I’m studying is proving to be a mire of poor standards, dull modules and a general fecklessness when it comes to pumping students with enthusiasm. I can’t work out whether that’s because they assume most of us have decided to leap in the direction of Canary Wharf itself, or simply because no-one really cares about education at all any more, but whatever it is it does raise the question of whether me caring about where I work really matters. For instance, twelve months ago I thought it might be a jolly idea to dedicate my life to research and the expansion of human understanding. Now, twelve months on, there seem to be so few people who genuinely give a toss - and even fewer who manage to survive - that I’m not sure whether anyone would notice the difference between me going for a PhD or just burying myself in a tech support divison for the rest of my life.

Naturally, there are some people whose presence alone is enough to remind me what I used to enjoy doing what I do. Family, close friends, and the occasional ones who don’t really know how much of an impact they have. But the numbers seem to be thinning fast, replaced instead by the hordes of younger students below me, all of whom have the same five year plan. Graduate. Do ‘a bit of work in Finance’. And then ’see what happens’.

Here’s a rough idea.