(This is a true story! I posted it on Linkedin in 2016 and it got several thousand readers, far more than my professional work which is somewhat depressing to say the least.)
I sold a chair today. The chair sat beneath me for the last, oh, fifteen years in two distinct capacities. First, it was my chair on the trading desk at Greenwich Capital, 600 Steamboat Road, Greenwich Connecticut. Then it was…err…umm…”removed” from Greenwich to my home office which is little more than a corner of a room in a corner of my home that’s my sanctum sanctorum, where I imagine the future and reimagine the past and remake it according to memories I’d like to have.
The chair was one of several of its type – a Hermann Miller Aeron, size B – that was left after the Greenwich Capital logo was chiseled away from the walls outside and replaced with the letters RBS and the firm moved north on 95 to Stamford. New name. New firm. New chairs.
I got that chair in 2009, just after the aforementioned move. Me and a couple of colleagues, who go by the names Bubba and Shecky, went back to 600 Steamboat to see what it looked like. Nostalgia, I suppose, because in the wake of the financial crisis RBS was not the happiest place to be and we all longed for the rather more prosperous and fun times we had at Greenwich Capital.
It was a place of extraordinarily quirky, odd, but largely enjoyable personalities, and characters one and all. (Even the egotistical jerks were tolerable as I recall, or short-lived.
It’s one of the good things about a commission shop where you get paid solely on what youproduce and there’s not a lot of room to care about the sort of office politics that exist in most Wall Street firms where sucking up to the guy who’s going to determine your bonus tends to be a vital skill you can develop. Of course I was in research and strategy which is deemed a cost center but trickle down worked nicely.)
Anyway, the three of us went onto what had been our trading floor, or what was left of it. The ceiling tiles had been pulled down, the ‘cream and green’ carpet pulled up and the desks and trading turrets largely dismantled with wires hanging about and the debris that had made us successful left in piles. It was incredibly sad and we all felt rather like lonely ghosts haunting for no particular purpose.
On our way out we ran into a facilities guy we had worked with and whose job it was to clear things out. In a building which had once house nearly 1,000 people he was the last of the last. He was the only sign of life. We reminisced for a second when he mentioned the chairs. It’s an odd subject to bring up in any conversation, but then it was perhaps a distraction from the sense of loss.
What he said was that there were all these chairs in the now empty garage just sitting about which is what chairs naturally do. “Do you want any?” he asked. “They’re the chairs from the trading floor.”
He could only mean the Hermann Miller Aerons.
We all went to see them in the garage where we had once happily parked our cars before starting the trading day. This was the garage I had taken my young sons into when I first joined Greenwich to see the Ferraris, Masseratis, the occasional Bentley, and Porsche after Porsche after Porsche – it was all obnoxious and pretentious, of course, but to boys aged five and eight it was, well, like the auto show.
And there were the chairs. Hundreds of them piled on top of each other, a few broken but most, overwhelmingly so, in perfect shape. I felt like Howard Carter opening King Tut’s tomb. A treasure was before us.
“Take one,” said the facilities guy whose name I deliberately keep to myself; I’m not sure what the statute of limitations is on conspiracy in ‘stealing’ used chairs. We looked at each other and coming from a Wall Street dealing background asked if we could take more than one. “I don’t see why not, we’re just have to find someone to haul them anyway.”
Right in front of me, the first chair I went to, had been mine. I identified it easily as “Ader Sux” had been written in White-Out on the back, I know not by whom, but liked the personal touch and so left it on. I had to have it. And then we all took one, then two, then three. I think we stopped at three and that’s three each plus one for my colleague Ian. I’m considerate like that.
We took the chairs back to what would be our new place of employment for the next few years (name withheld) but I kept one for myself at home. And there it served me well until I developed unrelated back problems and I found something else at Ikea and what a nightmare that maze of a store is. It took me about 45 minutes from the time I decided to buy the bloody thing to finding my way to the bins where the bits and pieces I’d have to put together laid but this is another story.
Once that new chair was put together I had the Hermann Miller Aeron sitting around doing nothing. Out of curiosity I took a look on eBay to see what they sold for and was shocked at how much a used chair was worth.
I work in a market with extreme efficiency in the delivery of securities, i.e. no one pays for shipping and there’s no disparity in terms of prices which has inhibited profit taking and my career sustainability. So rather than go to eBay I offered the chair on Craigslist for $300…at the low end of the trading range…on a Saturday night. Within 24 hours I had a buyer from a nearby town come over to take ownership. Full price, in cash, and the only thing I had to do was dust it off (and rub away the “Ader Sux” bit).
As I helped move the chair into his car – a spanking new, blue, Audi A6 so it’s not like the guy needed use furniture any more than I originally did – it got me to thinking about Greenwich Capital. I thought for a moment that it was kind of sad to let this keepsake go even as I remembered I had another two left at work.
In exchange for the legacy though I got $300. And it’s a Wall Street adage that no one ever got fired for ringing the register, or in laymen’s terms booking a profit. While my chair gently I weeps I wonder what happened to the rest of those chairs, I suspect my sale will prove the last of any transactions — the last bonus of Greenwich Capital.