Wall Street pissing contest

NY Mag has a great editorial op-ed by Michael Osinski, a software programmer who created the technological foundation that Wall Street utilized to blow up the economy.

I never would have thought, in my most extreme paranoid fantasies, that my software, and the others like it, would have enabled Wall Street to decimate the investments of everyone in my family. Not even the most jaded observer saw that coming. I can’t deny that it allowed a privileged few to exploit the unsuspecting many. But catastrophe, depression, busted banks, forced auctions of entire tracts of houses? The fact that my software, over which I would labor for a decade, facilitated these events is numbing. Is capitalism inherently corrupt?

For all the anger and frustration the country (and the world for that matter) feels, it’s always humbling to hear the stories of the smaller unknowns who played a part in the mess.

Traders had a contest. Coming in at eight, they never left their desks all day, eating and drinking while working. Then, at three o’clock, they marched into the men’s room and stood at the wall opposite the urinals. Dropping their pants, they bet $100 on who could train his stream the longest on the urinals across the lavatory. As their hydraulic pressure waned, the three traders waddled, pants at their ankles, across the floor, desperately trying to keep their pee on target. This is what $2 million of bonus can do to grown men.

If my job dangled a fat bonus check in front of me I’d be pulling off antics like pissing on toilet rolls, too.