Is there anybody out there?

While I've been very busy occupying, educating, and learning....  I do apologize for not being around.  This begs the question, is there anybody listening?

Do I just fade off into oblivion or do I continue; I guess this is up to you.  In the meantime, I came across a really great youtube video to help pass the time...

Charlie Chaplin supports global change.

I am the 1% whore

You are the 99% who are suffering at the mercy of the 1%.

You foreclose on your house because they squander your money.

You run up your credit cards only to have your available credit LOWERED, pushing you over the limit and incurring fees; which drives down your FICO; which raises your interest rates.

You struggle to pay your bills each month. 

You forefeit luxuries like taking the kids to the movies or out to dinner.

I do too...   But I am in a subsection of the 99% that serves the 1% yet does not reap their rewards; nor do I agree with their corporate policies and total lack of ethics.  I therefore am whoring myself out to the 1%.  How did I get in this auspicious position?  What do I intend on doing to help make the best of it?  That's why I am here; talking to you.  You may be one person, you may be 5,000 people.  OR, I may be writing for the sake of writing as a stream of consciousness to make me feel better;  a sort of poor man's therapy session.  Either way, my rant will continue.

I am intelligent, but uneducated.  I come from a humble upbringing; son of a city worker.  Mom stayed home to give us the best upbringing possible at the expense of both her sanity and a few zeroes in the bank account.  I somehow gravitated towards technology at a very young age.  At the age of  8 I got my first PC, which in 1981 was impressive.  A Tandy 8086 complete with tape drive and amber display.  Since then, I have moved to commodore, to apple, to PC x86 and now x64, and back to Apple.  I consider myself platform agnostic, I love technology yet have no biases. 

I broke into financial services at the age of 19; after working at on a PC assembly line / repair shop for a year.  I was responsible for Netware account administration.  From there (I'll spare you the details) it's been a slippery slope.  Some advances in my career have been the result of my abilities, some a result of being in the right place at the right time.  One thing I learned very quickly is that financial services is a unique dynamic.  "When you're here, you're family".  What I learned later is that the family is dysfunctional; and more of a mafia or cartel.  They suck you (me) in, they throw some cash at you, they make promises they never intend on delivering on.  I've now been on wall street for 20years......  The stories I could (and will) tell. 

My inspiration is simple.  The banking system in the United States is broken.  While I will avoid with great vigor climbing on a soapbox at any point in any of my posts, this I truely believe.  The days are gone where money met the gold standard in this country.  Morals have been replaced with greed and as much as I love NYC, I feel that the atmosphere of "Me, Me, Me!" here only breeds for the inhumane actions and total disregard for common human decency.  Something doesn't seem right when I have to step over the homeless guy outside the building so that I can work for executives making upwards of over $4,000,000 / yr. 

Let's level set here, I am not one of those executives.  I was raised, as I said, to appreciate all that I have and to not need much to get by.  I am a true engineer, and the team of engineers I work with are of a similar mindset.  We serve the firm.  The firm that exists to fatten up the 1%.  I can no longer in my right mind be forced to lay off good people only so that bad people can get paid at the end of the year.  This seems wrong to me.  So here I sit at a crossroads, one I've been at for a few years now.  I have moral issues with the current environment, yet I have a family to feed.  My sucking it up and coming to work each day has resulted in my being depressed.  I'm unhappy with the industry I work in, yet I love the team that works with me.  Still somehow, I fuck them in the ass on a daily basis.  So, you (the one person reading this) have the luxury of watching me either slip into dementia or right my course by attempting to do what I, as one person, can do to effect change.