TRAVEL HERE: BAD NEWS BEFORE THE CRUISE
It was Thursday. Our boat would leave on Monday afternoon. I had everything I would wear gathered into one section of the closet, ready to pack. Bill would wait until the last minute, as always. I was having lunch with my Bible study girls when I got a text from Bill. One of his uncles had died. This was sad news, but since they lived in Canada, no way we’d be attending the funeral. When I got home and he was in a blue mood, I thought the death was the cause. I didn’t know the sky was falling.
A Workplace Hiccup Shakes Up Our Cruise
It would take more than a blog post to explain what Bill does, but suffice it to say he’s in the market. He trades using a series of programs he has developed. His plan was to turn his programs over to his broker to make the trades while he was gone. This was a humongous project. There’s always a little housekeeping you need to do when you turn your work over to someone else and Bill had to put safeguards in place, so that his proprietary information would stay proprietary. So, in the weeks before the cruise he logged a lot of hours in on his computer to get everything ready. We were celebrating his birthday, after all.
Then it came time to shift his programs over to the broker and they ran into a glitch. It would take another entire blog post to explain it, so just believe me – it wasn’t good. They might have overcome the issue with more time to work on it, but there wasn’t any time. Like most glitches, there had been no way to anticipate it, so Bill was just stuck with having to monitor his systems himself during the cruise. He wouldn’t be involved in all the research and coding that goes into a normal day of work, but he wouldn’t be free of it either.
Bill spends his day with an array of pc’s and extra large monitors to do what he needs to do. He’d spent a couple of weeks getting some of it ready to turn over to his broker, who had his own set of pc’s and extra large monitors. Since that wasn’t going to happen, Bill now had to figure out how to get all that computer power into his laptop. The balance of time before the cruise was barely enough time to accomplish this.
Then the Market Blew Up
Friday morning the market blew up, as in fell apart and started dropping like a brick. Since the first of the year we’d been doing pretty well and that was why Bill had been ready to turn everything over to someone else and really enjoy the cruise. Now all of his plans were going to hell in a hand basket. We weren’t going to have to sell the house or anything, but it really wasn’t the kind of thing a trader wants to have happen before they leave town.
Even when it’s being good to you, the market is stressful. Trying to keep up with it on vacation with the market going down and no bottom in sight is bad enough. Throw his technical challenges into the mix and we couldn’t have picked a worse time to go if we’d tried. We had a standing joke that every time we try to leave it’s the worst time we could do, but he didn’t find it funny when I brought it up.
He kept all of this to himself until some time on Saturday. I just thought he was reeling from the market dive and his uncle’s death. When I knew enough to really appreciate what he was going through, I was surprised he didn’t just call off the cruise – but we hadn’t gotten travel insurance and I don’t know if our issues would have qualified for a refund, even if we had gotten the insurance.
So come back next Monday and we’ll head to Galveston and try to have some fun.
jane sadek 