Umbrellas

Friends, I wish to bring up a question I find most vexing, a question

I shouldered yesterday at the same moment as I raised my Japanese golfing

umbrella to the heavens in the face of an unexpected rainstorm.

Now as most of you know, I have a day job in the financial district,

working Monday to Friday in the World Financial Center. Some of you don’t

have day jobs, but take it from me, they’re not hard to understand. The

idea is that the place you work and the place you live are two different

places; that you travel to the former from the latter in the morning,

and retrace your steps in the afternoon. The vast majority of people in

the financial district on any given weekday fall into this category; the

remainder are generally tourists who have come to gawk at the Statue of

Liberty and carrying a chip on their shoulder about not having got a place

on the first ferry of the day to Liberty island. (Only the first ferryload

per day is allowed up to the crown.)

So what I wonder is this. How can it be that you never see people with

umbrellas if it isn’t raining, but everybody seems to have an umbrella

if it is?

I hope you see where I’m coming from here. If it’s not raining in the

morning, you don’t see people with umbrellas. But come the afternoon,

when they leave their offices for the commute back home, they all seem

to have procured one. Where do all these umbrellas come from? They’re

not the three-dollar jobs you buy on street corners, they’re the really

large golfing umbrellas which are 90% of the width of the sidewalk and

which generate a ballet of ducking and arm-raising between the sorts of

people who are normally at pains to avoid each others’ eyes. It would

probably be really quite amusing to watch if it weren’t for the fact that

it was pissing it down with freezing rain a few drops of which have managed

to make their way down the inside of your collar and are meandering down

your spine, soaking your shirt and rapidly approaching the waistband of

your underwear.

You can see why people want those big umbrellas, though. You take one

of the little black numbers out into any self-respecting New York storm,

and it will be torn to shreds within five minutes. Not that a shredded

umbrella really affords much more protection than one fresh from the little

Asian woman from whom you bought it: the lashings of near-horizontal rain

mean that it will protect one small spot on the back of your head if you’re

lucky. Even with a monstrous motherfucker of an umbrella everything below

your thighs can be considered write-off territory.

But anyway, the logistics of umbrellas. We assume that people only have

a finite number of the things. Now if you work in the corporate communications

department of a bulge-bracket investment bank, you can simply nab yourself

a freebie umbrella any time it rains from the dedicated storeroom downstairs.

But most people don’t have access to such a treasure trove.

Which reminds me: the New York Stock Exchange does a roaring trade in

umbrellas. It, like, sells them, for cash, from the little shop the tourists

flock into after taking their free tour. And most of the time, it’s not

even raining. Let me ask you this: do any of you know a single person

who would pay $17.95 plus tax to parade around in the rain with that dreadful

sub-IBM striped logo and the worse slogan “the world puts its stock in

us”? I mean, that ranks below “banking on success” in the world of dreadful

cliched financial puns.

I have a feeling that the people who buy NYSE merchandise fall into

two camps: German tourists, on the one hand, and New Yorkers, on the other.

The former we can safely put to one side, on the grounds that no one has

ever been able to fathom the internal workings of the mind of the German

tourist. The latter we can suppose fall into two categories of their own.

The first would be the poseur, who thinks that if he wears an NYSE sweatshirt

in a nonchalant enough manner while playing frisbee in central park, some

nubile blonde rollerblader will see him and automatically think him loaded

enough to be a possible date. The second would be the die-hard capitalists,

who wear it as a sign of allegiance to the hegemon that is multinational

global capitalism and the longest bull market of the century. In this

respect they’re a bit like the people who wear Tommy Hilfiger t-shirts

because they think they’re cool.

But back to the umbrellas. The point is, there are a lot of asymmetrical

days — days when it’s raining in the morning but not in the afternoon,

or raining in the afternoon even though it was dry in the morning. Don’t

the people who take their umbrellas into work in the morning take them

back home in the afternoon even if it’s stopped raining? But you never

see them, these hordes with their rolled-up umbrellas. Maybe they leave

them at work — that would explain where all the umbrellas come from on

the days when it starts raining around midday.

But how do they know? How many umbrellas would you need to own to make

sure that you’ll always have one at home if you need it and one at work

if you need it? I mean, what if there are, like, four or five days in

a row where it rains in the afternoon but not the morning? How many umbrellas

can you reasonably keep in the office until everybody thinks you’re a

complete nutcase? And have you ever seen offices filled with umpteen umbrellas?

I don’t know. Maybe there’s a roaring trade in people biking their umbrellas

back home in the middle of the day when they realise they won’t be needing

them that afternoon. Or maybe these umbrellas all dismantle, like those

rifles you see in movies, and pack up into a common-looking briefcase.

I can see it now — the first thing you learn when you come out of your

MBA programme and you start your job at Goldman Sachs is how to dismantle

and put back together again a full-sized umbrella in less than 15 seconds.

Get it done in single figures and you automatically get a job on the bond-trading

desk; take more than half a minute and you’re a junior equities analyst

for at least a year.

Friends, there’s a whole world out there we have no idea about. Go out

there and explore it, I implore you! And tell me where the umbrellas go

when it isn’t raining.