Keeper of Secrets

For reasons that I will not go into, I have not really been home much over the last couple of weeks and while I have had some opportunity to get some writing done I have mostly spent it reading and/or doing research on story ideas (also Deus Ex came out a couple of days ago so I have been busy doing a speed run through that - angry Jensen all the time).

In keeping with my call for story ideas I have made a few attempts on a story based on "A day in the life of a stockbroker" as James suggested.

I have not had much success.

At the start of the week I had a poke around in some economic websites and watched a couple of video interviews with young, seemingly 'hip' stockbrokers who had been chosen by which ever corporation they work for to act as promotion/information source on what stockbroking actually is and/or why the person watching should choose it as a career.

In my case it pretty much had the opposite effect - I found the whole thing rather soul sucking.

I'm not normally one to criticise people (or if I do it's generally for of a 'poking fun' sort of criticism) but to be honest after watching a few of these videos I came to rather quickly dislike everything about them and the world they live in.

I have a problem with any culture that is centred around an obsession with acquiring money for moneys sake, where it is treated as the only important thing in the world and how ever much you have is almost taken as some form of points systems indicating your value as an individual (if you have none you are not worth attention, if you have lots you win at life, if you have more you win several times?).

I have issues with the servile pandering of stockbrokers towards their monied clients.

I dislike how they sell themselves, both in the usually accepted meaning of the word, as in presenting themselves as best for the job (all the while surely lying, glossing over and over embellishing) and in the way in which they sycophantically trot along at the heels of their clients - leeching off scraps of wealth while they try to make as much short term profit off a system that should really be focused on long term goals and long term stability.

I will admit that my grasp on how the international economy works is rather weak at best but, given the current climate it seems to me that they way it does work is fundamentally broken and in the future a lot of people are going to have to pay a very dear price for the greed and happiness of a very few.

It makes you wonder what the world would be like if people were slightly different. If the average world view was skewed just slightly further away from selfishness, self aggrandisement and 'I'm better than you'.

Anyway, the whole purpose of this rant was really to explain that I was going to have to shelve the whole writing about a stockbroker for the moment as the whole thing made me rather uncomfortable and I the only story ideas that I could think of that seemingly had enough tension in them to be interesting were of the 'stockmarket crashes, stockbroker throws himself/herself out a window - or - stockbroker embezzles, becomes paranoid and is eventually found out and then throws himself/herself out a window' type and to me that felt a little on the boringly clichéd side.

Still it has been a little while since any writing went up so I will be hard at work on something more interesting over the next few days so then you can come poke holes in that.

*edit*

Here are a couple of the videos I watched

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnkQtCdFY0A

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATlRemuKN_o

Love how in the one with the woman in it she talks about her parents said they would pay for her arts degree as long as she did a 'sensible' course as well.

Also possible reason for why world economy is doing so poorly - people on stock exchange floors just spend the entire time fucking around just like everyone else.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUlVDqHG3X4&feature=related



M.