Wednesday, September 24, 2008

10 tips for those let go from finance

With the number of high finance executives being downsized from Shearson Loeb Rhodes Pierce Fenner and Smith Mae Mac and the like, it is time to think of ways in which the affected workers can make a positive step forward in their lives. Here's the list I came up with:

  1. If you were an experience in Structured Investment Vehicles, get yourself to Detroit and see whether they might be able to use you in a new line of concept cars of the same name.
  2. Employers are probably completely swamped with resumes from your colleagues right now, trying to figure out whether all the acronyms are real or made up. Hire yourself out as a resume reader to help filter the good ones from the bad.
  3. Contribute a foreword to a new published edition of Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
  4. Take your skills offshore to bring the home of universal homeownership to the common Chinese citizen. Learn Mandarin first.
  5. Don't you know there's a crisis in the health care industry in this country?! Get a set of scrubs on, pull on some surgical gloves, and learn to do something useful, anything!
  6. If you are still occupying space in an office, open up an account at Etsy and sell the crafts you make from leftover office supplies.
  7. Form a monastic order with your coworkers, roam midtown Manhattan begging for alms and doing good works. Call yourselves the Mad Mendicants.
  8. Get yourself to the State of Alaska, where all citizens are granted an annual stipend from the state, making it the ideal socialist paradise. And IT folks: while you're up there in the frigid north, you could make a living running computer datacenters with natural rack cooling provided by the Arctic air, and piping the warm air to heat dwellings. Ample diesel supplies to power the backup generators are available as well.
  9. Entrepreneurship may be a good option. See the picture for one concept.
  10. Appear as a contestant on a new reality show for mortgage insurance specialists forced to live by their wits and set in the jungles of Papua New Guinea. One challenge could involve defrauding the local denizens of their swine and roots. Attire: formal business wear.

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