Now, I've heard all sorts of reports of doom and gloom out of the States about the global financial crisis (henceforth to be known on this blog as the GFC), but what's happening with myself and many of my other friends here... well, in the words of Luke Wilson's newscaster character in Anchorman, this getting to be ri-God-damn-diculous.
Currently, my entire apartment is unemployed. As we all know, I was laid off almost three weeks ago. Another one of us was let go a week later. Another was going to start a job this month... until the employer called to say they were postponing his start date by six months. And the last, knowing that his old company would shortly be letting people go, left his job a few months ago and went to grad school.
An entire apartment of unemployeds. Fun. But that's not all! For if you count our group of 12 friends that live within a three block radius of each other here, EIGHT of us are unemployed. That's right: our unemployment rate is 67%! Ummmm, yikes.
Below is a lovely illustration of exactly how much havoc the GFC has wrecked upon banks.* Big ups to Santander (whoever those guys are) and JP Morgan for managing to retain at least half of their market cap from a mere 18 months ago. Can't really say the same for Citigroup and RBS. Yeah. Yikes.
*Okay, after uploading that picture, I see it's pretty much impossible to make out a lot of the writing. To view it at a much larger and more legible size, you can click on it. But the point is that those big blue circles -- representing each bank's market cap from Q2 2007 -- absolutely dwarfs the small green circles, which represent each bank's current market cap.
And just to really depress the shit out of everyone (in case I haven't sufficiently done so yet), there's a KFC near our apartment that has had "Now hiring" on its marquee* for at least six years, ever since I first came to Sydney. This has been an ongoing joke among some of my friends, as if KFC can never hold on to employees long enough to stop hiring new ones. Well, guess what? It's down now, my friends. It's down now.
*Can you call those signs outside of fast food joints a "marquee"? Or should usage of that term really be limited to big signs at Madison Square Garden or The Mirage or grandiose places like that? Well, you know what I mean by the term, right? Like those McDonald's signs that say "Billions and billions served"?**
**Remember when McDonald's actually gave a precise number of billions of people served? Like "87 billion served"? Why don't they still do that? Has it become too hard to count? But who would call them on that if they just made a guesstimation? Anyway.
You may remember this video, titled "Where the Hell is Matt?", which I included in this Kleinballs entry way back in June. Well, after watching the below video, in which the folks at First Round Capital stole the idea and had the people in all their offices dance around like a bunch of idiots, I'm fairly confident that if you played that song over a video of a monkey taking a crap, you'd still consider it to be the most profound and uplifting thing you've ever seen. My God, the music!
Just got access to Season 5 of Entourage a few days ago and have blown through it. I've come away with two thoughts. First, before this past week, how come only one person told me there was a character named Andrew Klein on the show, when those episodes aired in the US three months ago??!!?!? Come on, people! And second, the scene at the end of Episode 7, where Ari tells Vince that he's been offered the studio head job, killed me. Killed me. Maybe Adrian Grenier can't act worth a lick, but Jeremy Piven, in the most beautifully subtle way possible, absolutely nailed that scene. And when Vince closes the window shade on Ari, who was helplessly looking to him from outside for any sign of encouragement, well, it was for moments like that that the term "cold blooded" was invented.
At 3pm last Wednesday, I received a call from an agency I had sent my resume to. They asked me to come in at 8am the next morning, and I responded as enthusiastically as anyone could when asked if they'd like to go to an 8am interview, epecially when the rest of their day is wide open. And then the kicker from the agency: "Can you please put together a PowerPoint presentation that illustrates your viewpoint on the customer life cycle with a credit card?" So of course, I responded as enthusiastically as anyone could when faced with the task of preparing a presentation on the customer life cycle with a credit card in 17 hours. And then, this unemployed guy came damn near close to pulling my first all-nighter since college. Ahhh, the things we do for the GFC...
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