just saw this and chuckled thinking @patio11 definitely has a dozen great stories about this sort of thingpic.twitter.com/jQANcdJ0Tk
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I work for the Internet, at @stripe, mostly on accelerating startups. Opinions here are my own.
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just saw this and chuckled thinking @patio11 definitely has a dozen great stories about this sort of thingpic.twitter.com/jQANcdJ0Tk
Hundreds, at least, from consumer credit card reporting to bank mixups to immigration practice in two countries to AML/KYC needle threading to...
Here’s one: retired teacher has some minor banking mishap with Bank of Bigness. This results in several hundred dollars of fees. She is unsuccessful at getting them waived. I tell her to try Investor Relations. She explains she is not an investor. I try to explain to her she is.
This proves ineffective, so I call up the pension board and ask for an asset manager, who quickly informs me that they are (of course) I invested in Bank Of Bigness. I ask him if he’d drop a FedEx’d letter to BoB Investor Relations in their outgoing if I sent it to him. Sure.
If you are Investor Relations, and the Teacher’s Pension Fund For The Great State Of Middle America FedExes you a letter and says “To whom it may concern: We are very disappointed that...” ... oh, those fees were waivable after all. Fancy that.
Or, back in the day when this still worked (2005ish), my employer routinely sent Japanese researchers to the US. They’d have preferred to have US bank accounts ready to go but that was logistically difficult; most banks would require a site visit for KYC reasons.
Brokerage accounts had a different and less stringent regulatory environment for KYC at the time, and you could open them online with an emailed copy of your (Japanese) passport. We’d do that, fund the account, then have me call their CS line a week or two later.
“Hiya, this is Dr. Tanaka’s secretary. The doctor would like a checking account added to his brokerage account with you. What do you need from me to make that happen?” 100% success rate.
“Patrick, you weren’t really his secretary.” I mean, the doctor does (without loss of generality) medical research and my professional skill is calling American brokerages and getting them to do things for the doctor while protecting his time. What is that if not a secretary?
If you want some recurring themes here: the rituals of Dangerous Professionals are known to be rituals of Dangerous Professionals, and thus in some ways they’re as powerful as the authority, credentials, guild privileges, legal rights, etc of those Dangerous Professionals.
“Why didn’t you say ‘translator’?” Code of professional ethics. I was a translator, in a crunchier way than I was a secretary. Translators have to say exactly what the client does even if the client doesn’t know the magic words. Secretaries execute autonomously; that’s point.
The one time of my life I worked “translator” to advantage was helping a Japanese friend check in early to a US hotel. They said no. I told him: “We’re doing that again but this time you decline to use English, at all.” And I suited up because of course I am a salaryman.
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