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AI: Well, another, I wanted to ask you another aspect about life in a major corporation in New York City. You had mentioned in your writing, just very briefly about the corporate culture, and especially for people who don't have any sense of what that was like, could you describe a little bit about that?

PJ: Yeah. It was, you know, very glitzy buildings, so we worked right on 52nd Street and Sixth Avenue, Avenue of the Americas was right where our building was, right across from Radio City Music Hall, actually, just a couple blocks up. And the CBS towers and everything, and so just these fancy buildings, and we just had cubicles, but they were all kind of on high floors and so beautiful views, but it was really the lifestyle. It was like people spent -- and you know, we earned an inordinate amount of money for what we were... I mean, I earned then, at the age of twenty, what I earn now. [Laughs] So, so, and if I continued to work there, obviously my salary would be significantly different. But, you know, it was a huge amount of money at the time. Not quite what I earn now, but pretty close. And so it was just this lifestyle of, you took limousines everywhere and you talked in billions of dollars. And so people, I think you just lost the sense of value, and that was true when you ate, you know, at restaurants, and what you spent on meals and what you spent on dry cleaning. And the pace and the culture was, you know, that you stay up late and you work, and the person who's here until four in the morning and only gets two hours of sleep and is back at six o'clock, that's what you're striving for, and relationships don't really matter. And so the successful women that I saw had no relationships or broken relationships and no families, and there were only very few who were really senior women. The men, there was just sort of this "money is king" philosophy, which was ruling investment banking at the time. And in terms of the work, I saw very clearly the lack of values in doing the work, because we were buying and selling companies that really should probably never have been bought or sold, but the investment bankers got a lot of money out of it, and the principals often got a lot of money out of it. But what was of value out of that, where was the value added to the financial markets as a whole? And it was very hard for me to see where that was. So that was all part of the corporate culture.

The good things about it, very smart people, there were just some brilliant, brilliant people, brilliant thinkers. You had to be confident. I mean, I learned a lot about being in situations where I know nothing -- [laughs] -- but being able to somehow figure out what I'm supposed to do or what I'm supposed to say. And so it was great training for me as a young person, but there was no passion in it; it was soulless. It was, it was all just about money. That's really what it was about.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.