Our eyes were trained to follow every flicker. Hundreds of stocks flashed their rise and fall across the screens, with the Reuters newsbar spewing out company announcements like a Gatling gun all day. There were eight screens shared between each pair of traders, the monitors stacked on top of one another in a tight semicircle. Our chains were gilded ones, granted, but they shackled us all the same: from 7 till 4.30, five days a week, we barely left our desks. We sat in long, straight rows in the trading room, like slaves chained in the hold of a Roman galley. Steve on the other side of the room overruled my pleas for the air conditioning to be switched on - another reason to hate him and his crew on the old-boy side of the desk. Half past 10 in the morning and I was slumped at my desk, grey Hermès tie hanging despondently from my neck like a hangman's noose. It was a typical day of coke hangovers and questionable ethics.
