‘Confessions of a City Girl’ by Suzana S

This book started out life as a column in The London Paper and is a true story of rabid ambition, hard work, success, disillusionment and survival in the storm of our current recession. As you would expect there is a great deal of comment on the sexism that is rife in the city (world) but it is not a feminist text – it’s about equality although there are some very smart comments about how female behaviour could moderate the mistakes that have led us to where we are today. The style is extremely readable and I found it very difficult to put down – I started it this afternoon and apart from a couple of short breaks read it the whole way through. There were a couple of annoying typos – for example “yoke” instead of “yolk” and “principal” rather than “principle” but given the currency of the book I guess they were rushing to put it on the shelves.

The writer, ‘Suzana S’ (a pseudonym but hopefully no-one will feel the need to out her in the manner of blogger ‘Girl with a One Track Mind’ or she will feel the pressures to out herself as blogger Dr Brooke Magnanti or ‘Belle de Jour’ felt since she will surely be careerless since “City girls know all too well that the women who collect cheques in court rarely collect cheques in the City again” – and this expose is certainly a worse misdemeanour) mixes the technical side of the trade in layman’s terms with simple psychological observations highlighting the often ludicrous situations the City puts its people warriors in:

“At one point I felt like laughing out loud. We were adults, not children, I wanted to say. This is a job. It’s not the army, it’s not a cult and, despite the sponge pudding, it’s not a new school. I kept quiet, of course. Because there was always a chance I was wrong.”

Despite the author’s rampant desire to beat all of the boys at their own game and the seriousness she needs to be able to do this, the book is self-depreciatingly funny and full of entertaining if somewhat nauseating anecdotes:

“The other boys talked about planes, yachts and Swedish models. ‘You know Madonna once said about toys like that?’ I said once. ‘If you can fly it, float it or you-know-what it, then you should rent, not buy. That’s sound financial sense from a woman who knows.’ The boys thought about it for a while. Then we had a long conversation about the cost-effectiveness of renting prostitutes.”

And there’s plenty in her about the seedy sides of working in the City – the debauchery, alcohol, lewd, rude and disrespectful behaviour, marital infidelity through affairs and one-night stands, lap dancing, prostitution and cocaine use. And a sharp eye on the nature of the job in hand itself:

“‘If ordinary people get addicted to horse racing they get treatment. If we get addicted to this we get promoted,’ Gordon would say. I gave him a high five for that. Who cared if all our values had been turned on our heads? I no longer cared about life outside our trading floor. All I wanted to do was click into the world’s biggest legal casino and prove I could win.”

It’s this kind of observation that could get the writer in the most trouble though – when she, as many others do, question the value of the work they do vis a vis their salaries. She explains nicely how we arrived at this situation:

“There’s always been this preposterous idea that City players need to earn more each month than teachers do each year because of our extraordinary talent, and the volatile nature of our employment. Realistically, our most exceptional skill is scamming the system for the maximum amount of cash. Meanwhile, it is the mercurial nature of City careers that, in effect, pushes our salaries up so high. We made it a volatile profession by jumping ship as often as we could. That was far easier than doing our jobs well, and waiting to be promoted.”

And finally, in a nutshell of a paragraph, here’s how we shot ourselves in the foot:

“It was quite refreshing actually to finally see the truth if how the public had been taken for one over-extended credit holiday over the past few decades. Bankers stopped banking and became magicians, using misdirection, deception and illusion to make their billions. What’s securitisation, after all, if not a hoax? Is it any different from the age-old trick where the magician turns a penny in one hand into a pound coin? In the City, bankers took sub-prime mortgages, sold them to investors all over the world and distanced the lender from the borrower so far that the penny loan really did look like a pound one. The investors – and the regulators – could not believe their eyes and could not think of an explanation for the astronomical profits. Pure magic.”

Apart from the fact that ‘Suzana S’ is a great story teller who has met some fabulous characters along the way and seen and experienced some fascinating, on the edge moments and environments, I was able to sympathise with her. I worked in IT Sales for many years, still do on a very part time basis at the moment while I concentrate on writing, and although it’s like a diluted version of the City there certainly are a number of similarities. Male-dominated, although not as bad and the men are have worked with have in the vast majority been respectful and I’ve never been warned off or felt doors were closed to me because of my gender. But I could identify with her desire to balance her femininity and sense of self whilst playing in what’s mainly a man’s world and she did remind me of a client lunch not so long ago. I and another young, female colleague took two male customers to lunch near the Barbican. The men were probably ten to fifteen years older than us and directors in the IT department of the travel company where they worked. They had no problem understanding that as the supplier, I had asked them to lunch and would therefore be taking care of the bill. What amused me was that when I asked the waiter for the cheque, he gave it to the older gentleman who then passed it to me with a wry smile. I gave it back to the waiter along with my payment card who then gave the machine with the card in it back to my customer. My customer passed the machine back to me and I put my PIN in the machine and gave it back to the waiter. Who then gave the receipt to my male customer.