Night out with a trader

I made all the possible mistakes since I've started doing TV: in one week I shot with the night vision option on, forgot my tripod, my mic, didn't set up the sound properly, filmed a blured life and left my tape at home too many times. Yesterday I chose to repeat all those mistakes at the same time. No need to say that my desperate attempt to impress him failed a hundred percent. No need to say that when he setted up my camera for me, I was a little annoyed. Need to say that if I want to show my bosses that I'm made for this job, I've got a lot of bread on the board (French talk). Yes, I am aware. Yesterday night, I was out for an interview.

His flat is cold in substance, but warm inside. The man of the situation is a trader working in Canary Wharf. He lives in a posh area of London that he calls the West End, but that is not the West End - bless him. He has a huge plasma TV screen hanging on an empty wall, the last season of 24 ready to be watched and the flattest mobile phone I've ever seen. He drives probably the only Smart available in London and he told me he got hired because he made it clear in his interview: "I want to make money". That sentence wouldn't have lead him far in France I guess, as he says "France is a communist country". Fair enough. He described his experience in London as Biased by the financial world he lives in. This morning, he woke up at 5.45, left the house at 6.30. He won't be back until 7.30 tonight. I (so naively) asked him if such a schedule was justified, he looked at his watch while swallowing his coffee: "well, I'll be at my office at 7, that's 8 in Paris, 3pm in Tokyo: just on time". I looked at him with the redest eyes I'd never had: ... how can he be so awake?

That's the life he likes to have. He could look more arrogant than that, but he's too clever. He speaks neatly and is well educated. About journalism he said: "The problem today is about filtering the news. In my job we receive far too much information. Take Bloomberg: you can't even read the news flux, it's going too fast... I am completely against that whole blog thing: it doesn't provide the right information at the right time; it rarely filters. So many people feel the need to fill their blogs just because they have one, sometimes they don't care about the quality of the content". In my interview, I couldn't help looking at him with my very human eyes. I didn't dare to ask him "Do you feel lonely sometimes?".

He was just like that guy, you know the one we all have on our mind when we think of the City. The satisfied one, the engineer who works in high finance and knows the world mecanisms. Oh well, I believe this is just one certain point of view.

My day has barely begun. I watched him and wrote about him. Right now, he must be on the phone with the head of that South African bank he told me about, and probably forgot that I existed by now. But that's alright...