#171. Liquidity Access Plan (Wednesday, November 1, 2023)
What was your best day…of getting out of something at just the right time?
November 2023 was a time of major transition for me. In two and a half weeks, on the same Friday, I would close on a new downtown condo and finish my current job.
The condo transition was less dramatic than it sounded—my brother and his girlfriend would be living there—and the job change was even less geographically dramatic: my new desk would be one level below my old one.
Two weeks earlier, I had successfully moved from a temporary principal role in foreign reserves into a permanent principal position back in debt management, my original function (#124). That mattered more than the physical move suggested: my temporary promotion had an expiry date, and after years of slower-than-expected progression, I very much did not want to slide backward.
So all year I had felt pressure to prove I could operate at that level (#82). The first major project went extremely well,1 which made the next one—the liquidity access plan—feel even more important.
The problem was that this second project was messier, more abstract, and attracted far more debate. Several colleagues became heavily involved, including Aaron Brookbank, a close friend (#17, #12, #3) and senior trading-side colleague who had also become a demanding career mentor, and my replacement Lorraine. The collaboration around the project was sometimes tense, and at one point in April, a virtual discussion ended with me muted and crying.
We eventually repaired the working relationships and handled the file much better through the summer, but I never regained much enthusiasm for it. By the fall, I was pushing it forward mostly because it was still my responsibility as principal.
This Wednesday was the culmination: a formal exercise with senior management and several other teams. At that point, Aaron had just been seconded to another organization (where we’d soon work together again, #114) and Seung Hyun, his Calgary counterpart, had taken on much of Aaron’s role in the project.
Around sixty people attended in person or online, and it was much more than a presentation. I had to walk everyone through the system from start to finish, then direct questions to the right experts at the right moments so the room could work through issues that rarely surfaced in ordinary meetings.
It went well. The discussion sprawled a little, but productively, and generated a clear set of directions for future work—work that, importantly, would no longer belong to me.
The day was elevated further because Seung had flown in from Calgary for the week specifically to attend the exercise in person. We had clicked immediately during my Calgary visit earlier that year (#107), and that night he, Lorraine, several Ottawa traders, and I went out after work.
And it went very late. We drank for a few hours at 3 Brewers beside the office, had dinner at El Camino, then finished at the Lieutenant’s Pump.
The Lieutenant’s Pump is basically a maze of smaller bars connected by narrow hallways, making the place feel much larger than it is. We settled into one section, and I repeatedly pestered the staff to put Game 5 of the World Series on TV.2
It turned out to be the clincher. By then, my obsessive baseball fandom had become a running joke around the team, so half the entertainment was everyone watching me narrate the final innings of the Rangers’ first World Series title.
This night might have been the social peak of my six years in foreign reserves, at least in Ottawa (#24). It was nice to save one of the best for last
- I partly have a Grade 2 ankle sprain from office basketball to thank for that (#94): being stuck at home for a month gave me very little to do besides work.
- At first they said they’d put it on. Literally a minute later I asked again, and the guy laughed: “Yeah, I’m on it. Settle down, man. You are way too excited.”