Brian Phillips
speaker
74 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Brian Phillips’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Marrow had gone up for the IT job mostly because it wouldn't be all that much work compared to the mailroom under its new leadership. Now he realized that he had to avoid even the small amount of work that was expected of him at all costs.
He told his coworkers, hey, you know what? You go up and take care of this operating system crash. Which, he'd add, I could totally do, by the way. But because I'm so nice, I'll stay here and fill out all the paperwork so you don't have to do it.
If his coworkers complained, he'd just point out that at the time, he was smoking a lot of weed at work, and he probably shouldn't be wandering through the hallways on his own.
Marrow, like Icarus himself, had gotten way too high.
I bet all the other tech guys loved you because, like, nobody wants to do the paperwork. Nobody, bro.
Yeah, fuck that. You're like, yeah, we changed out the warp crystals on the dilithium drive. Yeah. Yeah, yo. Got some new photon torpedoes in the modem. Man, wait.
They could still be there. They could, you know, under a different name. Well, maybe not at Lehman Brothers, but somewhere.
This is also how I keep my job as a podcaster. So how long would you think a person could keep a tech support job at a massive global investment bank while being stoned most of the time and not knowing how to do any tech support? If I tried that at my job, I think I'd get caught in like four days max.
This is two years. For half of an entire presidential term, for someone's whole junior and senior years of college, Marrow kept walking this tightrope. The 90s rolled over into the 2000s. The stack of incorrectly filled out paperwork kept getting taller. The pressure kept mounting. Mero kept lying at work.
And this was not as chill a thing to do as it maybe sounds, because the truth is, a lot of things about Lehman Brothers were just pretty terrifying. The atmosphere was incredibly high stakes, but under the surface, also incredibly feral and chaotic.
And it's just a briefcase full of gold.
What finally saved Mero from getting caught, what came to his rescue in a way, was maybe not exactly the thing you'd expect. He was saved by a world historic event.
Before 9-11, Lehman Brothers' global headquarters was at Three World Financial. So you can picture the building, maybe, if you've seen 9-11 footage. There's Tower One and Tower Two, the two big World Trade Center towers. And then nearby, there's the smaller skyscraper with the green roof. That's where Mero worked. Thankfully, he wasn't there when the planes hit.
He'd been off work visiting his family in the Dominican Republic. He got back from his vacation on September 9th, but he hadn't gone back into work yet for one very good reason.
So the very good reason Mero didn't go into work on 9-11 is... I was too lazy.
Mero and his cousin stayed on the phone, though really, what could they say?
Three World Financial, where Lehman Brothers was headquartered, became uninhabitable after the Twin Towers fell. So the company reassigned Merrow to Jersey City and moved him back to the mailroom with a raise. So he was making the same money he was making in IT, but now no one would ever find out he'd been bluffing around computers for two straight years.
Mero quit Lehman Brothers pretty soon after that, though, because the commute was annoying. And the Lehman Brothers bros, the Lehman bros, bros, kept wanting him to go out with them after work.
And so, after two years, a major terrorist attack, and a transfer to Jersey, Merrow never got caught for lying his way into the IT department. And he'd end up quitting the bank a few years before the financial crisis burned off Lehman Brothers' wings and dropped it into the sea.
But he'd seen enough waste and entitlement and magical thinking and dudes barricading themselves behind multiple rows of monitors and acting like masters of the universe during his time there that when the crash did hit, he wasn't exactly surprised.
Showing 41–60 of 74 · page 3 of 4
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