Boom Time

When I was young, career advice was rudimentary. On hearing that I was interested in literature, an advisor told me that there was an opening for a printer’s apprentice in Stratford-upon-Avon. Nobody mentioned jobs that paid you millions for being incompetent.

A classmate of mine got a job in a bank and most of us secretly approved. In our hearts we knew we were not going to be racing drivers or film stars, life after a country grammar school was not going to be exciting, but working in a bank was steady and respectable. Banks were solid. Bankers smoked pipes; they did not snort nasal highballs and pole dancing happened only in Poland. Had you written of something like the subprime crisis, or the dot.com bubble, it would have been filed under “satire.” The pay-offs some executives have received would have come under “fantasy.”