Please, I'm trapped in Kogod and I need your help
By: Noah Cohen
Dear Fellow Wonk,
You've been selected for a once in a lifetime opportunity: a representative from Ohio wants you to pour him coffee and pay you nothing. Did I get your attention? Good. Now, please, keep reading and read carefully, as I don't have much time. I desperately need your help.
Countless nights ago I made a fateful decision: while walking the manicured lawns of our beloved Friedheim Quadrangle, I took a turn off the beaten path. I was intoxicated, you see, drunk off of Nate Silver's latest polling model (which put Hillary Clinton at a healthy 7-point lead). Before long, I was lost. As I stumbled, desperately trying to find my way, I smacked into a column. My Ray-Ban sunglasses shattered. I took them off and felt my face. What luck! My Ray-Ban eyeglasses underneath were unscathed. I looked around— had the night gotten lighter or had I just been wearing sunglasses at 11 p.m.?
Where was I? I looked up. It was then I saw the unspeakable building that has come to define my miserable existence. I dare not repeat its name, dear reader, though a rhyme might help in your identification: NO GOD, reads its cursed inscription. Arlene and Robert NO GOD. For there is no god in these walls as much as there is no mercy in hell. It pains me to tell you, dearest reader, that I passed through the entry portal. With an uncontrollable lurch, as if guided by the limp shake of a Turning Point tabler, my hand fell upon a button. The doors open and at that moment I recognized the choice had been made for me then. Free will, like the invisible hand of the market—as I would soon learn—is but a cruel illusion.
Wisdom tells us not to judge a book by its cover, but, dear reader, I ask you this: if the book is hewed from flesh, and the embossing woven of sinew, will the ink not be written of blood? Lo, not even the building's wicked exterior did justice to the evil I found inside! I was welcomed, nay, sentenced by a ghostly figure, bounding towards me as the doors shut behind. It took the shape of a wolf, mangled and marred. Jordanus Belfortius was the creature's name. It grasped my arm in its maw of S&P 500-odd teeth and dragged me away. For a tortured eternity, I have witnessed the denizens of this forsaken building. They shamble besuited, arms outstretched, hungry for the souls they do not possess. Endlessly they cry out: "invest, invest, never divest!" I have never been more frightened. I was then brought to the gloomy depths, made to sit in a most uncomfortable chair. In front of me a device of untold misery, yes, you guessed it—the Bloomberg terminal. It is here I waste, made to buy the lows but never to sell. I lose it all. I buy again. I lose it all anew. I am but a bear market Sisyphus.
I have access to neither pen nor pencil in this digital hellscape. My fingers bleed, chafed raw from target price analysis. It is with my own humours I write this letter. I have managed to tape it to the back of a skeletal MBA, he who brings my sustenance. Twice a day he journeys to the Tenleytown Chik-Fil-a, unconcerned with the ethical quandary of its consumption. If you are reading this, it means the letter has found society, and you know of my pitiable condition.
Please, my eyes have grown weary and my fortitude weak. I fear my time is close. I beg you: tell the world of what has befallen me; send help however you can. I pray news of my predicament might reach President Clinton, so that she might set me free. Dear reader, she did win, right? Right?