Then I would have even less to do than I do now. So I stood in the back of the crowd and looked up at the screen and added fractions.

But today they are spinning off this silly Palm Pilot company. Plenty of people are saying this is another sign of the apocalypse, that they are valuing PALM at x number of billions of dollars, and they just make these silly organizer things which are basically like a glorified day planner. Quite frankly, I don’t even know anyone down here who has one. But in the grand scheme of fluff, I suppose PALM isn’t too bad, because there are plenty of companies on this exchange that don’t make anything. And just recently the NASDAQ crossed 5,000 and it had just crossed 3,000 when I started working here a few months ago. That’s pretty fucking incredible. Apparently nothing like this has ever happened before, but you wouldn’t know by talking to any of these goons.

The one thing that I have realized lately is that there are a lot of fucking mutants on this floor. Don’t get me wrong, just about everyone down here is pretty smart, at least smart enough to get a real job on the Street, but I get the impression that these people down here are otherwise unemployable in a job where you have to put on a shirt and tie every day and look good. Like, there is a guy down here who is retarded, well, not retarded, but his face is all fucked up and he talks funny. He is a broker. There are actually a couple of people like that. But he’s not stupid, and neither is T22, this rangy broker that ranges around the floor and makes errors left and right, usually because he is massively hung from partying constantly, but people let him out of errors for whatever reason and he keeps right on going. He is not an idiot. Anyone who makes that much money is not a moron. Sometimes I wonder if all of these motherfuckers were spit out the bottom of the business world and gave it a go at something where personal appearance doesn’t matter. It’s kind of like when you see a local band somewhere, in some medium-sized town like Fresno, and they’re really fucking awesome, and you wonder, why aren’t these guys selling millions of CDs? And the answer is, of course, because they look like mutants. It’s acts like Savage Garden that make it big instead.

W83 and I make our way back to the booth. Back next to the JLS booth is the Bay Bridge Trading booth, currently occupied by Steve, who is usually contemplating weed. Next to him are a couple of whiz kids from Stateside Trading, who don’t talk to anybody. They think they are better than everyone, including us JLS guys. They probably are.

“You ready to palm your pilot?” asks Steve, to no laughter. W83 is in no mood, a half hour from being fed to the lions in the COMS pit. Janice is chasing down her Filipino clerk and the Stateside kids are off splitting atoms.