( 4:37 PM )
Started a new parttime job last week: running orders in the livestock markets at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. I take order tickets from phone clerks and deliver them to brokers in the trading pits. The orders are for futures and options on cattle, hogs, pork bellies, milk and lumber. I don’t know how lumber got in there with all the livestock; it’s the smallest and saddest market--a dozen or so guys standing around waiting for something to happen–and it sits off to the side, out of sight of the other pits, like a stack of old two-by-fours piled behind the barn.
Actually, I like lumber. When you take an order back there you feel like they’re grateful to have it. In all the other pits they just snatch the ticket out of your hand and thrust it into the chaos, leaving you standing there empty handed and apart, looking in at their yelling, gesticulating, cussing, pushing each other sometimes in anger but usually just because they’re in each other’s way. Nothing personal.
Occasionally of course a fight does break out. That’s futures trading. And by the way, a future is a contract to buy or sell a commodity on a specific date in, voila, the future. So if you buy an October hog contract at 66, you’ve just agreed to pay $66 for a rail car full of hogs come October. Of course, traders never get the hogs; they sell a contract to negate the one they bought, closing their position. If they sell for more than they bought, or buy for less than they sold, they’ve made money.
Beyond that I won’t try to explain futures trading, because beyond that I’m not sure I understand it. Nor do I want to. I took a job on the trading floor because I’d always wanted to see it up close. There is a subculture in the pits, something you can’t see from the visitor’s gallery. You’ve got to get down and move around in it for a while.
I’ve only been down there for two weeks so I all I can offer are a few observations. Later I hope to develop this but here’s what I can tell you for now.
Running is easy, and boring. A runner spends about half the day just standing there in his flimsy yellow jacket, waiting for an order to come in. Once it does, he has to know who takes what orders. In the hog pit and both cattle pits, a different clerk takes orders for each contract month. Options go to somebody else altogether. All in you’ve got about 20 clerks whose faces you’ve got to match with a contract and a month.
And that’s another thing: the months. You’ve got to memorize the fucking months–not which ones have 31 days or which ones go with what zodiacs, but which ones match their completely unrelated and illogical one-letter abbreviation. For instance, January is F. April is J. July is N and November is X.
I’ve asked a few old salts if they have any idea why the letters don’t match the months; they don’t, although one guy closed an eye and looked up at the ceiling, searching his memory as if I’d asked him the name of his first teacher, something he’d long forgotten and now wondered if he’d ever known at all.
So after a week or so you learn the months, and the faces that go with the contracts, and then you can start to look around. And you might as well look around, because there’s nothing else to do. Running is one of those minimum-wage gigs that are not only tedious and stupid, but offer no opportunity for excellence.
In most good jobs you can excel by outpacing your obligations, by going above and beyond. In running there is no above and beyond...go above and you’ll hit your head, go beyond and you’ll never return.
The best part of the job: you get to throw trash on the floor. The trading-floor is covered in wall-to-wall scrap–-old order tickets, discarded duplicates, morning newspapers, gum wrappers and other hard-to-identify paper detritus. Somebody put a few trashcans around the floor, a gesture of decorum that is utterly futile before the irrestible joy of making a mess. Like the six Coke cans you toss in a cooler full of beer.
Every day in the morning there’s a guy next to our desk who takes a deck of old tickets and flings them in the air. They go about 20 feet up and burst apart into a fluttering dome that makes the exchange look, for a second, like the inside of a snow globe.
There’s lots more to tell, but it can wait.
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