“No, but I’m ready to peel my carrot,” I reply, punching up COMS in Microhedge. I print out a clean risk report for W83, with no positions.

“You look like you’ve been building your upper-body strength,” he quips, grabbing at my guns.

“You have no idea how many staff meetings I’ve had.”

W83 is usually good for a few one-liners, being a funny fucker himself, but he’s lost in thought, staring at the sheets, and plenty grumpy. I sense that this is not the time to be making jerkoff jokes and I shoot a look at Steve, who goes back to looking at his monitor.

My cell phone rings. It’s girlfriend. Fucking shit, I can’t talk to her right now, not right before the spinoff. I notice I have three other voicemails from her. That’s odd. She’ll call me on the floor, but only once a day, right after lunch. I drop the vibrating phone into the breast pocket of my trading smock, making a mental note to deal with her later.

I follow W83 over to the COMS pit, and there are already a few dudes camping out there, like people queuing up to go shopping at midnight on Black Friday, and the COMS traders, the regulars, are scowling at them. I watch as W83 occupies a piece of real estate behind the smelly bastard, tells the dirtybird MQ to put him on the wheel, and a mustachioed trader with a Hawaiian-shirt print smock promptly crumples up a risk report, wings it at W83 and beans him off the forehead with it.

“Dickface,” he says.

W83 takes it in stride and goes back to staring at the screens. Although I gotta tell you, the kid does not look right, right now he looks like he’s climbing into a boxing ring to fight Mike Tyson, and he knows it. Shit is going to happen fast with this PALM spinoff, and one error or lapse in judgment could cost W83 his career. Hell, it could take down the entire firm.

So I’m standing in the back of the pit with my back up against the side of the booths, and it is already filling up in here. W83 is far from the only dickface they are going to have to worry about. Seems like every carnivorous fish on the floor has smelled blood, and they are all swimming around in this pit. The spinoff is about twenty minutes away, and already there are sixty, seventy guys in here, and half of them have brought their burritos. It smells. And I have Janice to my left who I think has sort of pushed up her boobs for me twice in the last ten minutes. If she comes over and brushes my ear again, there is going to be a problem, the last thing I need is to be pitching a tent in a crowd of dudes. I’m not even sure how I am supposed to clerk for this guy, he is already three rows deep in the pit. But he is on the wheel and whenever I see W83 on the screen, I yell out shit like “sold 10 March 80 calls” or “bought 3 March 65 puts,” and I can tell the other dudes are going to get pissed at me. There is a trader named Hong from the AMD pit, whose ear I accidentally just yelled in.