The First Part of Chapter 11: Spreading Ripples

James spent Wednesday morning at work trying to fill in the hole left by Inxton Car Seats; he felt rather guilty about letting the file slip through his fingers; while their bankruptcy had freed up the convention space for his wedding, he was still suffering the repercussions; Maurice had said they needed to cut costs somehow, and would no longer be filling the water cooler, and would be selling their parking allotment in their office building; it was purchased by an entrepreneur looking to turn it into bike storage, which many people in the office thought was a good idea; James and Colleen had both praised him, in person and when he wasn’t around, for taking initiative, and wondered whether he had any other plans; Colleen had promised to be a loyal customer. He then spent an extended lunch hour perusing the stock listings in the business sections of The Globe and Mail while eating a bag of potato chips. The fall effect had set in, by which stocks typically do poorly in September and October, and thus he had seen plenty of down days in the markets; he was beginning to rue the investment choice he had made in January, betting that a silver mine in Bolivia would be doing well; such was not the case, and he was regretting that decision to the tune of two thousand dollars; that was his only major stock purchase in the year, he noted with consternation. Gambling at points pays off, and playing the stock market in such a fashion was gambling; there was the issue of first movers, for instance, making innovation and staking mineral claims essentially a horse race, with investors turning into gamblers betting on the winner. When it fails to pay off, James found, there were serious issues concerning what the hell he was doing playing around with his money. When one did well, on the other hand, there would be congratulations all around. Patricia was the one who normally said this, but she was now taking the pressure off concerning some of his poorer investing choices, and was focussing her attention on Katherine, quietly pressuring her to find a boyfriend.

“Something on your mind, Jim?” It was Karim, who was working with Colleen on the marketing strategy while juggling two accounts.

“Just the news,”

“It always is,”

He then read the editorials, and he could see a prominent piece by Helena Perari, doing what she did best: the commentary was a stern lecture to Mopps Sousa about keeping promises to the army. “When one says you are not going to spend more than a year on a mission, you live up to your word; never make a promise you cannot keep,” he read; the article then went into the ramifications of making promises one would not keep, and finished with a righteous bout of proselytising on the lies politicians say to get elected. “It unquestionably diminishes the value of public participation in government, and does nothing to help the good name of democracy,” she finished. James thought Sousa’s tendency to give grandiloquent and overlong speeches about various subjects unrelated to the army mildly entertaining; the one for which Perari had been chiding him saw him talk about posterity, and James had the impression that Mopps Sousa was ignorant of the meaning of posterity.

James was home early, due to him having finished most of his work, and with all clients reasonably happy, he decided to stop for the day. Thus, he was home at four thirty, as opposed to the normal six thirty. He part read a chapter from The Wealth of Nations (It was the one on taxation), and, most remarkably, managed to stay awake without having his eyes drift all over the page or putting the book down and getting preoccupied with something else. At five, he busied himself with dinner, which that night was to be mussels and sauce, served over rice. That James was cooking meant that the rice had a quarter teaspoon of salt in it, as did the sauce. This being mussels, it was ready within half an hour, and he ate then, but alone, and salted his food, as was his habit; Clarissa didn’t arrive home until much later, and the dinner he had served onto a plate for her was cold.

“You didn’t say you’d be home so late,” said James as Clarissa entered. It was seven, and she was normally home before six.

“Sorry, I just had this meeting that dragged on and on endlessly, and some person from Finance or wherever was droning about the account of something or other. It must have been the Union’s pension plan, that’s it. Anyways, they’re looking into investments; I can’t see why they don’t just buy stocks at random. All of us know that luck and random chance are just as good models for stock market behaviour as the most sophisticated modelling instruments,”

“Ah yes, the market as giant casino model; it’s my favourite one, though not one that the stock analysts take kindly to; it implies their job is pointless,”

“Yeah, thank goodness Vilia slumped over and the guy who called the meeting decided it was time to end it. Yvon then made an off-colour comment about my ass. ‘It’s growing rather large,’ he said. I retorted with a remark about his caboose, and then he asked me how much turkey I had on Saturday,”

“There was someone like that when I worked at Scotiabank; he would always be womanising, he was a real chauvinist, and would make all sorts of smart-Alec remarks about the women,”

“What happened to him?”

“Management shipped him off to Peru to manage branch operations there.”

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