The first time the head jack refused to connect, I was pulling an all nighter.

A client had unexpectedly fired its CEO that day, and as the junior analyst I was tasked with rebuilding the financial model from scratch. Not only had the firing blown up my initial report’s VaR, I also had to reassess the liquidation value of the entire company. The Street was expecting multiple compression by the time the markets opened in the morning, and I had until then to come up with a list of potential shorts to serve as proxy hedges.  

Melville Capital’s offices are on South Street and directly face the East River. I stared out at it as I flipped on my Bloomberg Terminal and plugged the module’s jack into the postauricular sulcus directly behind my ear. I braced myself for the post-jack euphoria that starts at the back of the skull before it dilates the pupils. 

Nothing.

I was still rawdogging reality like a plebe. I plugged and unplugged the jack several more times. Still nothing.

The panic started to set in. I was a quant without a jack. I worked at a hedge fund whose only mantra was to generate alpha, and here I was at risk of style drift, barely a step above the retail tourists who traded on Robinhood. I could already picture the company-wide email announcing that I was “pursuing personal capital opportunities,” the go-to maxim for informing everyone that I had been fired. The Street’s equivalent of a dishonorable discharge. 

I tried to slow my breathing. I could fix this, but first I needed to make it through the night. I flipped on the Terminal’s manual setting and started typing on a keyboard I’d barely touched in the three years I’d been at Melville. It felt like swimming through molasses. I had my Altoid can full of Zyn pouches with me, and within hours there were four of them pressed up against my gums, pumping 24 collective milligrams of nicotine into my blood stream.

Stochastic calculus and derivatives pricing aren’t like riding a bike. I was fumbling through the dark, unearthing half-learned formulas that I hadn’t calculated by hand since my junior year at Princeton. The Terminal’s AI chatbot took pity on me, patiently answering questions about brownian motion, martingale models, and stationarity.

By the time I handed the report into my boss the next morning, my eyes were bleary and bloodshot. She opened her drawer, rooted around in it, and produced some eye drops. “I’ve already got some,” I said.

A month later I found myself in a psychiatrist’s office. All the technical diagnostics I’d run had come back clean, which meant it wasn’t a hardware issue. It was my own brain threatening to turn me into a beta chaser who’d be at perpetual risk of overfitting while every other high frequency quant ran circles around my models.

The psychiatrist told me not to worry, that he sees this a lot, especially in high stress environments. The jack rests perilously close to the hypothalamus, and spikes in cortisol can cause a “clenching” around the jack that cuts off its access to the prefrontal cortex. People in his profession have a non-technical term for it. The Bends.

Three hours later I found myself sitting at my apartment’s home office with an unopened bottle of Lexapro. On my computer screen, I scrolled through a list of contraindicated substances, my heart sinking with each new line. Alcohol. Blow. Addies. Molly. Special K. It was basically an itinerary of my entire night life that traced the trajectory from an early reservation at Sushi Noz to me stumbling out of a Long Island strip club at 6 am, my eyes crustily blinking at the rising sun. By that point I’ve snorted and swallowed my way through an alphabet soup of pharmaceuticals, and now I was supposed to throw it all away? For what? Five hundred grand before bonus? All the deferred comp in the world could never displace the experience of grinding with an NYU sophomore who used a fake ID to get into TAO. That German industrial techno music is unbearable when you’re sober.   

I just couldn’t do it. I began furiously plugging and unplugging the jack, waiting for the distinctive click sound before dislodging and trying again. I was stripped down to my boxers, and at some point I felt a tiny drop on my thigh. It was a speck of blood. I’d worn the jack raw.

The only choice was to go analog. I had to channel my ancestors, the legendary chain smokers who executed their buy orders on actual green slips of paper. Blythe Masters invented the credit default swap in 1994, when analysts were still excited about the introduction of tabbed worksheets in Microsoft Excel. The Bloomberg Terminal back then only cost $12,000 a year. 

My coworkers weren’t amused. Being quirky gets you laid when you’re a cafe barista; at Melville you’re just a beta chaser, a dead capital black hole who’s slowly bleeding out. Your dispersion trading misses every available benchmark, and before you know it you’re being assigned treasury basis trades just so the firm can limit your blast radius. 

My boss finally called me into her office to put me out of my misery. The HR rep sat next to her, nervously fidgeting his hands. I was counting vested options in my head and trying to remember if the severance total factored in the previous year’s bonus or merely relied on base comp. And how would I spin this firing on my Raya profile?

But my boss had something far worse in store for me. “We’re transferring you to wealth management.”

She might as well have been sending me to Siberia. Wealth management meant sitting over a plate of surf & turf pretending to be amazed at an NFT marketplace idea pitched to you by a fifth-generation failson who’s six weeks into Narcotics Anonymous. It meant passive investments in Boca Raton motel chains and helping octogenarian clients retrieve their lost passwords for their Vanguard accounts.  

I stumbled out of my boss’s office completely shell shocked. I sank into my chair and swiveled it so I was facing the East River. The ferry was pulling away from Pier 11, and all the plebes on the top deck looked like tiny specks. I was one of them now.

Slowly, I opened the top drawer of my desk where the bottle of Lexapro sat untouched. I unscrewed the top and then dry-swallowed a pill. A German techno DJ was scheduled to headline at Nebula that night. I’d need to buy some ear plugs.