Look out, you might get what you're after

Senior year in high school, my advanced English class read parts of the Canturbury Tales. I suppose the most precise thing to say here is that we read "selections from the Canturbury Tales, but for reasons I can't really explain, "selection" is one of two literary terms that I have always actively disliked. (The other is "extended metaphor." But I digress.) As my fellow literary snobs know, the prologue to the Tales is a character sketch of all the pilgrims Chaucer met on the road to Canterbury. After we'd read the prologue in class, we were assigned to write a series of character sketches modeled after it, a tale of a chance meeting with a group of people on a journey and a more detailed look at at least three of them. You might say we were asked to write an extended metaphor of the prologue. You might, but I'd rather you didn't. The tale could be told in rhyme, like the original; but it didn't have to be, as our extremely arrogant teacher wasn't sure we'd all be up to such a challenge. Best of all, we were allowed to work in groups of up to four.

Now, I had four best buds in that class - three guys and one gal - and I always did my group projects with some combination of them. However, on this occasion, the four of them teamed up before I even had a chance to talk to any of them, so I was left to do the assignment on my own. That's high school for you! I was down, but not out. After a healthy dose of teenage angst, I sat down one afternoon at my parents' 1987 Atari 1040 and, in one sitting, pounded out seven or eight pages in rhyme and iambic pentameter about a guy who's driving to the beach and meets a busload of rednecks at a roadside diner. I set it aside to edit and/or rewrite as necessary, but never thought of any way to improve it and just hoped for the best. On the day the assignment was due, we had to recite our compositions in class. After each group (and they were all groups, except for yours truly) had one member read their work, the teacher would provide some positive comments and some critical ones.

But when I read mine - coincidentally just after my four friends who had forgotten me - there was no criticism forthcoming, from any corner of the room. What did the notoriously hard-to-impress teacher say? "Well, what can we say after work like that? Incredible." The four friends? "We don't call him The Venerable for nothing!" By the end of the week I was getting compliments from friends who weren't even in that class. (The teacher had taken the liberty of reading my work to the other classes, as an example of what they could do if they tried harder.)

Six months later on the morning after graduation, as I was leaving the all-night grad party, a girl from the class - whom I had barely known - hugged me and said, "Bye, Dave, it was great listening to all your stories this year." That remains the closest I have yet come to what I'm guessing John Lennon felt at age 15 when he saw Elvis getting mobbed by girls on television and decided to go buy a guitar. Thanks, Laura, wherever you are. Hope you like my book if I ever finish it.

Why, you ask, am I bringing all this up now? Two words: Lehman Brothers.

Of course I was delighted when I got the chance to come to Singapore last spring, but I had been hoping to get a job in a bank. I did make the first-round cut in a couple of places (not Lehman's, though - I don't think they hired anybody from my class), but with no prior banking experience, it just wasn't going to happen in this economy. I didn't feel too sorry for myself over that this summer, as I was just glad to be employed somewhere. But I now feel secure enough in my current job to admit that I really didn't think it was going to fly for a while. It was boring (sometimes it still is, but things have picked up), it wasn't what I had planned to do with my degree (but then I always knew I might have to fall back on something else at least temporarily), it wasn't very well-paid (that's about to change), and I missed Paris. Who wouldn't miss Paris, of course? I told myself getting a job there without an EU passport is just about impossible anyway, but it isn't really. Difficult, but not impossible...if you can afford to wait around until somebody turns up willing to sponsor you. I, of course, could not. On top of everything else, after the false start in Luxembourg, I figured it was just a matter of time until the same happened here.

As I've discussed before, things have improved quite a bit after that slow start. I'm not rich yet, but business is picking up and it looks like there's going to be a lot of business-travel around Asia coming up pretty soon (not to mention a possible trip to Las Vegas in February). But that's beside the point. Whether there's a pot of gold down at the end of Orchard Road or not, it's a steady income that I can count on for the time being. If I had gotten a job with a bank...well, no need to dwell on that right now!