Every morning, while I'm having my inhaled nicotine breakfast, this fellow walks by. Short white guy. Older, shaped somewhat like Al Capp's Schmoo. He's got a thinning strip of white hair that runs from just above each ear across the lower back quadrant of his head. He always wears a suit, a revolving set of five, if my count is correct. They fit him well, but the fabric is old and dull. You can tell the lining has been complete worn to crap. When he walks past, you can see strips of thin liner hanging down from the inside of his coat jackets, like sartorial Spanish moss. The suits seem, otherwise, well taken care of. They are always clean and his shoes, though the soles are worn so that he walks with his feet leaning hard to port and starboard, are always shined.

    The real reason I notice this guy is that he always whistles on his way to work. I never recognize the tune. He might well be improvising: a jazz whistler. I don't know that he's particularly happy. He walks with the same sort of emotionally inert stare that most New Yorkers adopt when their on autopilot. Maybe he's euphoric, maybe he's pondering his own morality, maybe he's thinking about how much he wants a double meat BLT burger for lunch, maybe he misses his dog – who can tell? Regardless, he's always whistling his nameless tune. It's usually pretty upbeat, full of high notes that jump around seemingly at random.

    I like to think that he started with some easily recognizable tune. Let's say, sometime after he got back from Korea and scored his first job at the paper supplies company on Carmine, that he started that first day with "Smile, Smile, Smile." Since then, I like to imagine, he revisited the tune every day. He added flourishes and extended improvisational solos. When he got promoted he included a short section of "Plenty of Money and You." When the company took him off its best territory he worked in a motif from "It's Just One of Those Things." It was "Summertime" when his daughter was born, then "I'll Be See You" when she was married. For several years after his wife passed away, a long "These Foolish Things" dominate the song. Now, perhaps, he just follows his whim, adding to it as inspiration strike, reworking old riffs when the muse is too busy to be bothered with him.

    But, like I said, who knows.

Office

    Tech is gearing up for a big product launch. For most of us, it is an un-event. The old compost heap is getting a tad too high, so their giving us a nice new hole to shovel our garbage into. For Fearless Leader, however, this is a red letter day.

    Fearless Leader, founder and guiding spirit of Company Y, has always had a soft spot for the tech guys. He has never fully shaken the technophiliac enchantment of New York's financially unsound and culturally embarrassing "Silicon Alley" era, the tech-savvy and money stupid context in which he made his own rise to the lofty heights of near solvency, and he views this white elephant team of overpaid dotcom refugees as his only link to the lost Golden Days. Consequently, whenever one of the tech guys manages to so much as successfully wipe his own ass – and this is not a given with said crew – it is a cause for company wide celebration.

    To build up to the grand unveiling of The New Hole, Fearless Leader has decided to send out a series of countdown emails, each featuring a "Great Moment in Financial History." The first went out last Thursday. It covered Ford's introduction of the assembly line in 1913. On Friday, we all could rush to our inboxes to ponder the miraculous appearance of the world's first credit card, introduced by the Bank of America in 1958. Those seeking the inspiration of great men could find somebody to admire on Monday, when we got a whitewashed histroid about Morgan and the consolidation of US Steel. Today, on 19 blah-di-blah, the world sat up and took notice as James Cana was born. "Who?" those not completely versed in the esoterica of financial history may well ask. Why, that's Fearless Leader himself! That's right. Without any appreciable sense of irony or scale, this man, our own Fearless Leader, has put his own birth date into the rolls of "Greatest Moments in Financial History." I feel I would be remiss if I did not take this moment to recap some of the highlights of his administration:

1.    He took the company public with a $24 IPO. The market took one look at the company's actual value and gleefully traded shares at 4. It has, to be fair, climbed to the lofty heights of $9 per share, though it has never reached its initial offer price – it's never even come within shouting distance of its initial offer price – its initial offer price and its current value live in separate universes, unaware of the other's existence.
2.    He, personally, racked up several hundreds of thousands of dollars in harassment suits due his "hands on" management style. There are numerous women in the early twenties who are, essentially, retired do to the generosity of Cana's love.
3.    He lost us a huge contract with a Middle Eastern government that will remain nameless when he told his host, a minor member of a royal family that had invited Cana to stay with them at their compound, that he "always equates Ramadan with suicide bombers and stuff."
4.    His company has steadily lost money for 6 years in a row.
5.    And he's currently overseeing the largest round of layoffs the company has ever suffered.

    I assume Wednesday's great moment in financial history will be Black Monday or the start of Milken's junk bond trading.