Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Seamless Web

Well it's 1:18 AM and I just got home. I guess tonight before I go to bed I'll write a little about Seamless Web - every analyst's best friend. First though, a quick run-down on the day.

Things for me were pretty slow through the morning. I got in right at about 9:00 AM, which is pretty late for me. I spent most of the morning studying options, swaps, and other derivatives. For lunch I went out with my mentor to a really nice place and got the best steak I've ever had. It was amazing. We talked a lot about college and I realized more than ever how different my college experience has been from the "normal" colleges around the USA. Thank goodness!

In the afternoon I got staffed on a sell-side M&A deal with a short fuse. It was pretty intense because I had to work quickly and not make any mistakes. We got through the book pretty quickly and without too many problems. At about 9:30 the book came back with comments so I made the changes and double-checked everything. That took a while because some of the changes were formatting things that took a while to figure out how to fix up.

Sometimes it seems like the MD's and SVP's think that you can just move everything around on a slide as easily as they can draw it on a piece of paper. It's almost funny the things they have you change. When we were hearing how to fix one slide, I was thinking in my mind, "He probably has no idea that what he just drew on that slide will take about 30 minutes to update."

So anyway, it was a good night. When you have work to do, time flies and you wish you had more time to get things right and triple-check everything before you have to turn it in with your name attached to it.

So about Seamless Web. Every big bank on the street has this system. It's basically the way that you get food every night. It kind of depends on the bank, but generally if you stay in the office after 7:00 or 8:00 PM, you get $25 to spend on dinner. That doesn't mean that you have to wait until 8:00 to eat, it just means that if you get dinner at 6:30 then you better stay until at least 8:00 (but seriously, as an analyst, will you ever NOT be in past 8:00?).

Everything is done online. You have a list of 200+ restaurants in New York that you can choose from. When you pick a restaurant, you see their entire menu and you just add whatever you want. Seamless Web automatically adds a nominal tip for you, plus tax, so you can see a running total of how much it will cost you as you add things. It's awesome! Any kind of food you want is on there. Last night I just got a sandwich and a little tub of pistachios. Tonight I got a wrap, plus a sandwich for lunch tomorrow (so I don't have to spend $10 for lunch). You can basically get any type of food and dessert imaginable, every night of the week. If you work weekends, you get two meals per day.

The more senior analysts and associates will sometimes have the interns order for large groups of people. Because Seamless Web will just split the overall costs with everybody equally, usually it ends up that everybody owes $22 or so. The analysts will then order cases of Life Water or Coke to stock up their mini fridges using the $3 per person that's left over. It's funny how you learn all the tricks of survival out here.

Anyway, that's Seamless Web. Along with late-night car service, it's one of the few perks of staying so late in the office. Well, I just got an email that I'm needed back at the office, so see ya later!

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1 comment:

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