Why is the cart following that horse?

I've started working for Charles Schwab and I've begun with training, as I would with all other companies. I've been in training with employees 'fresh from the world', pulled into an avalanche of information with the purpose of bringing new people into the fight. The first three weeks of training is on the computer systems, of which they seem to have 8 or 9 that an employee must use in tandem to handle the plethora of questions that an employee must field. The thing is, as I and a one other lady are fresh from the world, the other 30 people in our training class are in different stages of their training, pooled into this class to learn the systems. There are Schwab bank associates, newbies who've already been in training for a couple months, paid solely to pass their Series 7 exam and now that they've passed, they need to know the computer systems. Already they have knowledge of the industry and when they ask questions of the instructor, they throw out terms I've never heard before. Put, Call, Lot, short sell—er? So, I have no idea. On top of having no idea what they're talking about, the curiosity has been killing me. It isn't that knowing now will make me a better employee, as they're going to put me through a similar training as my jealous-making coworkers have had. I'll know it all eventually, but I have a vengeful need to know that nags at me. The nagging makes me note the terms and concepts I don't understand and look them up on the internet when I should be enjoying my three day weekend.

I'm endlessly fascinated by the new job because it's a company built around investments, and all importantly, money. I've never had money, real money, so I'm riveted when people buy commodities and gamble on a huge scale to make more money. I think of all the times I've contributed money into a 401(k) knowing that it's something about investing and supposed to give me money for my retirement, but who really knows what else goes on? I mean, I helped proofread the booklets that they send out detailing the performance of the mutual fund, big numbers going up, and sometimes down, but I didn't think to find out what the numbers meant. A mutual fund is a bunch of people risking their retirement money, banking on the past performance of the stocks and the smarts of the fund manager or managing company. It's, I'm finding, all about trust. As much as its dollars and cents, or dollars and sense, it is also trusting that the companies you've invested in will continually improve.

When the whole Enron thing happened I had no idea what happened, why it happened, and all I knew was that the upper management were lying liars when it came to the company profits. Their lying effected the employees who had their personal retirement riding on the success of the company, ruining the retirement of, at least, all the older employees who had decades of investment in the company that took a dive through the floor. I watched an interview on NBC with two employees, an older lady in her late fifties who had been with the company for over 20 years, and the other was a fresh-faced business school grad who had taken a position with Enron a year before. For the younger woman it was just about finding a new job with Enron on her resume, but for the older woman it was her life savings that she'd invested into the company she'd trusted blindly from the minute she was hired. I didn't know anything about investments, buying company stock, retirement funds and all that, but I knew poor. I knew the loss of this woman's savings and when she looked about ready to cry, I was ready to cry with her. Well, now I'm learning the structure of the deal, how it was all lost, and my contempt for lying liars is developing a whole new layer, the nuts and bolts of the stock market.

Granted, I'm five days on the job and I know enough to know I don't know anything yet, but I can see subject matter that will keep me interested for a good, long time. Of course, that's dependant on passing systems class. Hopefully after the systems class, the other lady and I will be tossed in with other people who aren't light years ahead of us in the stock market learning curve. But then, I might not be as jolted into studying the subject matter if I weren't already feeling so far behind. I feel like I'm learning to walk while everyone is taking flying lessons, but I'm loving every minute of it.