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womzillaI woke up this morning to an NPR newsreader saying, in that calm and unhurried way, "Kevin J. Maroney, your life today is going to be completely and utterly bollocks." She didn't use those words; what she said was more like the English sentence "The Securities and Exchange Commission last night announced an emergency ruling prohibiting short sales." But my magic decoder ring was working superbly.
The SEC has made four major rules changes in the three days in a desperate attempt to keep the American economy from falling off a cliff, shattering into pieces against the cliff, catching fire, and exploding. All of these rules changes, in the grand scheme of things, amount to a very tiny trampoline at the bottom of the cliff, but every one of them brings massive amounts of frantic efforts to re-tool the automated trading systems that drive most of the American stock industry, including the department which pays my salary. Compliance meetings, on-the-fly code changes, memory leaks. frantic calls to other vendors whose systems are far less stable even than ours--it's been a nasty few days. And fourteen hours after I left the house, I am home from work, my day a complete bollocks, less than no software testing (my supposed primary job) done.
Our department is doing quite well profiting from the misery of others--we're not an investment firm, just a pure broker/dealer, and the series of crises is driving a great deal of business through our door. But it's just plain wearing us out.
Edited to add: You know that $1.5 trillion in bailout money? Not a penny of that is coming to me.
The SEC has made four major rules changes in the three days in a desperate attempt to keep the American economy from falling off a cliff, shattering into pieces against the cliff, catching fire, and exploding. All of these rules changes, in the grand scheme of things, amount to a very tiny trampoline at the bottom of the cliff, but every one of them brings massive amounts of frantic efforts to re-tool the automated trading systems that drive most of the American stock industry, including the department which pays my salary. Compliance meetings, on-the-fly code changes, memory leaks. frantic calls to other vendors whose systems are far less stable even than ours--it's been a nasty few days. And fourteen hours after I left the house, I am home from work, my day a complete bollocks, less than no software testing (my supposed primary job) done.
Our department is doing quite well profiting from the misery of others--we're not an investment firm, just a pure broker/dealer, and the series of crises is driving a great deal of business through our door. But it's just plain wearing us out.
Edited to add: You know that $1.5 trillion in bailout money? Not a penny of that is coming to me.
