An Analyst's Tears

I am working at a small financial data provider firm at the moment. The room I am in has like 6-8 people depending on the day of the week.

On my right is a small Chinese woman with spectacles. She works as a financial analyst. We are actually doing a project together which involves calculating some financial data from spreadsheets. She is pretty cool.

The past few weeks have been pretty busy at work. I have found myself coming in on weekends, national holidays and getting home as late as 8-9pm. But things have calmed down slightly this week.

While sitting at my desk contemplating whether or not I should do any work today I heard a sound. I looked to my right and I saw the analyst take her spectacles off and start to breathe heavily. Something seemed weird. She then started crying pretty loudly.

I started thinking the worse. She has a small son who goes to nursery, did she get an email saying something happened to him? Did someone she know die or get hurt badly? From what I could tell her phone had not rang…

The four of us in the room went over to find out what had happened. I could not really make out what she was saying since English is not her first language, and she was crying pretty hard. However, I made out her saying the name of a worker in the company and point to an email on her screen.

The analyst had passed on some quality control work to a member of the data entry team next door. But the person next door had made some mistakes and there were some errors in the database. Because of this, a senior member of staff came down pretty hard on her in an email for passing off work saying the analyst should be doing this task herself and criticizing her general performance.

However, the analyst had done nothing wrong in passing it on. I guess since the world is coming to an end and the company is not doing well everybody is on edge.

The analyst’s tears made me sad for a couple of reasons.

As gay as this sounds, I think everyone should be nice to each other and treat each other the way they would like to be treated. And maybe it is just me, but there is always something annoying about seeing the most peaceful and cheerful person in the room getting shitted on.

While crying, the analysts said something along the lines of “I am doing my work properly and trying my best, but she (senior member of staff) is saying the work I do is not good!”

Her tears taught me something about her. She must really care and take pride in her work to get that worked up about it.

Makes me wonder what the fuck I am doing here. I spend half the day daydreaming and browsing the web and I couldn’t give two shits what anybody thinks about the work I produce…