PatriceAct One
I still have dreams about Patrice,
Telephone service call stress dreams,
Where clients make irate demands,
Then new trainees won’t follow plans,
And none of my solutions stands
When management barks on down me
Unreasonable commands
But you don’t know Patrice.
She was a big girl, a Southern city belle tower,
and no broad shouldered simple brick shithouse either.
Of class, all steel and stone and opaque glass windows,
she stood double digit stories at the corner of Broad and Cash,
She was so high a handy mans spirit level proved her swagger.
as she cast her ominous shadow over the race for cash,
that rat race that scrambled on below.
She was a multi service consumer bank,
with a step back block head
and antenna wire hair.
In a mumu.
That was Patrice.
Her stature daily would wax and wane
by the inflating or deflating bids and calls
of the options and mortgage traders of Wall Street.
On good days she stood tall at $ 57/share,
such as when another lessling merger would
send crawling new vassal craven offices
whole floors mounting and scandent up her outer walls.
Sometimes they were grafted on,
but often just consummately masticated
into her great conglomerating halls.
Yet on a bad day, say when profits missed,
she could crash diet all the way to $ 52/share,
a dance of binge and purge driven by
the ask and ask with no bid and ask again
of those same black and white computer keyboard minstrels of Wall St.
Of course, eventually, at that price, with the weak hands out,
all trustworthy brokers on the street knew she was value priced, and,
while tardy but business punctual, would press those bids of assurance again,
and Patrice, like a weight lifter pumping iron
would once again raise the bar back to her mean, her price,
at $ 55/share.
A trustworthy broker, you ask?
We thought them trustworthy.
We trusted them.
We trusted them to be brokers.
We weren’t oxymorons at Patrice.
Yes, really, we did.
We all talked like she was alive.
Often answers to tough issues were
‘We’ll have to ask Patrice,’ which meant
everyone involved didn’t want to be,
all of us feared ever decide a damn thing.
Thus, ‘We have to bump it up to Patrice,’
meaning that corporate home office,
where also either no one had the authority to make a decision,
or those that did didn’t want the responsibility and pushed back,
irresolute in their suspensiveness, with a timid
‘Well, I think we’ll need a little more information on that.’
And there from comes that horned bed bug,
that diabolic insect who knaws
my nightly slumberous thoughts, twisting
my unresposing sleep into those horrid dream stress top knots.
by her boring earworms of scorn,
and her sursurrant wet willie tongue, such, even now,
still, in my sleep, murmurs Patrice.
In a mumu.
Intermission - (don’t get up)
Act II
You may ask, what were her business plans?
Patrice’s drug of choice was usury,
and the worse it got the more she’d need
and the more she’d need the worse it got,
until no fix could fix her fix.
As no borrower of reasonable means would pay her fees,
she sent her minions to missionize in the ghettos,
where the underclassed crawled on knees
and mendicated "Missy Please,"
to monetize their racing rat subsistence.
To push her plan we waived her fees,
we would take zero down with ease,
and postpone compound interest ‘till
they were compelled to borrow again
to cover the deferred interest bill.
Then that’s when we'd offer the payday loan…
All scrambling just to pay up on the first.
which all just made all problems worse.
From there we fed Patrice just like any junky.
She was a wheeling dealing dervish
lost in debts death tornado,
for with the more easy loans we wrote,
the more her credit ratings swirled,
and then street spooks wrote revised reports
on the outlook for our troubled girl.
A meeting of the directors was called,
all the board just shouted around,
"…We need more cash to boost our margin… "
"…We need to cover all the failed loans we wrote…"
"…Which means we need to write more loans…"
"…Which means our ratings will continue to plummet…"
"…Which means putting more pressure on our margins then…"
"…Which means… we need…"
(all together now)
"…MORE CASH…!"
If Patrice had been a dog she’d a et her tail.
And then, one crisp fall morning, on the first of the month,
a borrower, whose name was Eponymous Note,
was asked by his banker, ‘Can you pay?’
And he coughed.
Not yes, not no, Mr. Note just coughed.
Seconds later, through the electronic lightspeed of program traders
New York heard the cough, and the traders pressed the ask.
Patrice’ great stature quickly slid,
forcing more to cover and so press her on the wane,
untill soon, by Friday noon,
she was waiving her arms and heaving to,
like an inflatable waving arms sales puppet,
not tumbling, but orderly sliding irretrievably down
the pig slop sloping trough of financial disrepute.
By 1pm we were shocked to see,
on a flashquote quote – it was her!
Dimute, mousely, nearly shrouded in the pink sheets, it was her!
I yelled aloud ‘It’s her, Patrice, quoted at 69 cents per share!’
I think we could not think despair,
I think we just not thought,
We stared.
By 2pm a Fed matchmaker had flown to town,
and quick a shotgun suitor was found.
He was a west coast conglomerate, named Colossus-Midas Group,
who, in a perverse reverse dowry,
offered $ 1.69 a share for his vitiated bride.
And the auctioneer banged ‘Sold.’
Colossus-Midas, known by us as ‘Mr. Group,’
determined quickly he could not turn underwater mortgage holders
and the over stretched paycheck junkies into gold,
So, with disdain for our former ‘clients,’
he strode roughshod over those neighborhoods and municipalities,
stamping foreclosure notices on the overdue borrowers
blocking their sun with his titanic shadow
and left them all pinched out,
without even the hope of a paycheck loan when we closed the payday shops.
Next, Colossus-Midas strode over us to,
having met with his ‘integration’ team,
our operations were merged with theirs,
which meant they merged our work with theirs
and promised us good references.
And as for her? Patrice?
You must understand, now she’s very short.
So small, in fact, a CEO’s son mistook her for an action figure,
until his Dad told him,
‘She’ll see no more action, Son.’
Nevertheless, today still she shows up daily
for work at Colossus-Midas each weekday morning,
indignantly punctual at 8:30.
And her boss is that same CEO, where,
in his office, between a glass shard sales trophy
and a playskool toy helicopter, which,
on last years ‘Take Your Son To Work Day’
was left there by that very same CEO’s son,
there,
antenna crestfallen,
Patrice sits,
on a shelf,
In a mumu.
