Las Vegas, and the Eternal Nature of Potential Grief

My first full-time reporting job, with benefits and everything, was at Registered Rep. magazine. It was 2002, we were owned by a newspaper conglomerate, I took the A train from 207th Street to 14th Street to go in the office every morning, enough time to read the Daily News cover to cover, there was a New York Sports Club right next door that gave discounted memberships to everybody in the building, there was an Irish pub across the street we all drank at all night after we closed an issue. It was a real job. Registered Rep. covered the financial services industry, a trade publication for stockbrokers, and my beat was the regional brokerages: Raymond James, Edward Jones, A.G. Edwards, Charles Schwab. I was expected to cultivate sources at each of those regional brokerages, talking to brokers every day, getting a sense of the trends in the industry, their individual complaints, the way the wind was blowing. I talked to brokers to write about brokers for brokers.

I was not good at this job, for the reason I’m not good at most of the things I’m not good at: I didn’t really care. I cared about doing my job, and I really did do my best, but at the end of the day, I just didn’t really care about regional brokerages in the financial services industry and, no matter how hard I tried, simply could not talk myself into doing so. I needed that job, though, so I was…