Near the end of the meal I become anxious about when the bill arrives. I want to tell Rebecca that I am not wealthy, as she thinks I am, but if I do that she may believe I am innovating an excuse not to pay for the meal, and I do think it is my duty to pay. When the waitress comes, she points to my plate. “Are you still working on that?” she asks. I say no, although I am.
Rebecca is finished, and she takes out a cigarette and asks, “You mind if I…”
I say I do not mind, but I wish she did not, both because of the odor and because it is unhealthy for both of us, but people do not like being told their choices are unhealthy, especially if they already know it. It also surprises me that she is worried about drinking alcohol around me but still smokes.
Then I tell Rebecca I must excuse myself briefly. On the way to the restroom I locate our waitress. “Miss, may I pay by credit card now for the meal so you do not have to bring the check to our table?” I ask. She takes my card and swipes it. I add, “Please withhold from my friend this highly privileged information,” and I give her a 30 % gratuity to certify that she follows my request.
I return to the table and pretend to dry my hands on my pants. “I have positive news,” I say to Rebecca. “When I was at the front of the bar, I learned we were automatically entered into a lottery, and we were the winners, so therefore our meal is free.”
“You sure?” she asks.
“Yes. You will see. The waitress will not present us with a check.”
The waitress arrives in a minute to retrieve our plates. “Thanks a lot, guys. Have a nice night,” she says.
“Thank you, Karim,” Rebecca says.
“You do not have to thank me. It was a random accident that we won.”
“Thanks, anyway,” she says. “Randomly and accidentally.”
We walk to the Chambers St. subway station that we can both use, although I am going uptown and she is going to Brooklyn. My entrance is across the street from hers. She stands at the top of the stairs.
“This was fun. We both work a little too hard. You especially,” she says. “Let’s see if we can’t do it more often.”
“I would enjoy that,” I say. “But let us see if we can do it more often.”
She looks confused. “That’s what I said.”
“You said, ‘Let us see if we can’t do it more often.’”
She says, “That’s an idiom. It means ‘Let’s see if we can do whatever.’”
“Why would you employ the negative when the intention is a positive?” I ask.
“Maybe to make it seem like you’re not fully invested in it?” she says. “Not that I don’t care. I don’t know what I’m saying, I’m rambling.” We pause for several seconds. “Well,” she says, then puts out her hand, “have a good night,” and she shakes my hand hard like we are at a business meeting and quickly descends the steps.
I enter my subway, and by then she is reading a book on a bench at a distant end of the station. Her forehead is very concentrated most of the time with a small compression in it and sometimes she smiles to herself at what she is reading and once she even laughs quietly to herself, which I have never done while reading, but that is because I read financial books, which are humorless. She does not notice me, and I keep observing her until her train arrives, and through the window I see the back of her head and the subway light mirroring the top of her hair like a silver crown until she disappears into the tunnel, and then I listen again on my voice recorder to her saying “Well…have a good night” multiple times to decipher it, because frequently it is not the words themselves that matter but the way they are said.
are you still working on that = are you still continuing to eat a meal
grab a bite = get something to eat
homesick = missing home so much as if it were an illness
invested in = care about
kill it = terminate services
let’s see if we can’t do = let’s see if we can do
JOURNAL DATE RECORDED: OCTOBER 24
On Friday morning I greet Rebecca, and she tells me again that she had a good time last night. Dan enters, and she says, “Time to put our noses to the grindstone.”
At 9:00 a.m. Kapitoil predicts the price of oil will rise 6 cents. I buy a contract. Kapitoil looks similar to other programs I am running, so my podmates do not know what I am doing.
At 10:00 a.m. the price of oil is up 4 cents. I sell the contract and we profit.
I immediately run Kapitoil again and put more weight on articles written in the last 90 minutes. It has a new prediction: down 3 cents. I short a contract.
At 11:30 oil is down 4 cents and we again profit.
I email Mr. Ray that we have made two consecutive profits on the hourly transactions. He green-lights me to continue until 5:15 p.m.
I make five more transactions during the day and profit on all of them. At closing time we have made 1.6 % profit even though the ending price is only a few cents higher than the original price.
I decipher the reason it was malfunctioning. With the historical data, the program used newspaper articles written through the entire day and averaged them collectively to predict the closing price, but in practice I was using articles published in the morning. It was a foolish but understandable error: When you initially succeed without resistance, you sometimes overlook serious problems that may appear later. When people face challenges, however, they innovate more, e.g., in the way that the mother of a poorer family may produce a complete dinner out of minimal and inexpensive ingredients.
I can now revise the program’s potential. Because the market can vacillate approximately 0.5 % every hour, if Kapitoil operates at full efficiency, it can achieve up to 4.0 % daily average profits during standard business hours. Over four weeks, assuming maximum vacillation and optimal predictive ability, this equals profits of 219 %.
Mr. Ray emails me at 5:30 p.m.:
Nice work today. Finesse the program some more over the weekend, and let’s do it again on Monday. I’ll replace the 100K in your account.
Mr. Ray does not seem like the class of higher-up who frequently provides compliments, so for him to write “Nice work today” means very much to me. I almost forward his email to Zahira, but I do not want her to know about the program, both because (1) it may still not function and I do not want her to think I am a failure, as she considers me the smartest person she knows, even though I believe she is probably smarter than I am, which normally bothers me but not when it is Zahira, and (2) Kapitoil must remain highly privileged information.
After Dan and Jefferson leave, Rebecca puts on her blue wool hat and coat. “You up to anything fun this weekend?” she asks.
I will be refining Kapitoil to operate at full efficiency, but I cannot tell her that. I also do not want to lie 100 %, so I say, “I will be laboring on some projects.”
She crashes her hand against her head as if we are in the military. “At ease, then.”
Over the weekend I finesse Kapitoil. I am focused, but several times on Saturday night I wonder what Rebecca is doing, e.g., is she at an event, is she with friends, or is she alone like I am.
finesse = labor on for enhancement
put one’s nose to the grindstone = labor intensively
JOURNAL DATE RECORDED: OCTOBER 25