Saturday 12 June 2010

Ice Ice Baby

Lately "icing" has become a regular event.  Maybe it's Smirnoff guerilla marketing, maybe it's just an independent fad.  The short of it is that Smirnoff Ice is a girl drink, and buying one for a guy is an effective way to emasculate the recipient.  Send one to the recipient (note: anytime, anywhere is fair game), and he has to chug it down on one knee immediately, unless perhaps he currently has an ice on him (pocketed perhaps?), whereby revealing it sends both back to the original sender, forcing the sender to drink both.

Either way I'm hoping this isn't a fad with longevity.  Meme of the week: Bros icing bros.

This cropped up in full force at our recent teambuilding event a few weeks ago (FirstEnergy teambuilding: speed dating for the whole firm).  Ice was flying.  After the euphoria of that night, I got an email a few days later when I woke up, from someone with a score to settle:

Analyst: "So I'm settling in to study some CFA on the late night flight to Toronto, and the stewardess comes up to me and says – Sir, the fellow in row 19 would like to let  you know that you've been iced."

Classic, he didn't even see the sr. employee when boarding.  That's a classic way to ice someone, and everyone on the email thread pointed out the class of this manouvre.

Last night we did an après work at West.  We chit chatted with our brethren at BMO for a while, until they took an open table.  A half hour later, the younger and drunker portion of the group decided that the BMO table needed icing, real bad.  A waitress carried over a full tray… Gentlemen – you've been iced.

Being good sports about it, here's the collateral damage that was sent our way care of the BMO guys - some girly drink popularized by Sex in the City. 



















As you can probably imagine, the exuberance of this activity is pretty amusing to watch.  The plots for many more icings are in the works.  Guys are asking other guys assistants "which golf course will he be on in Phoenix" or "which restaurant is he dining at next week with clients in New York"...

Goldman Sachs Not Only Wall Street Firm To Get In On Icing Phenom



















Last week we mentioned that Goldman Sachs, in spite of the assumption it was immune from taking part in peasant-like drinking games, had played host to at least one confirmed icing on its premises at 200 West Street. For the uninformed, "Icing" is the new game the kids are playing these days, wherein you surprise a "bro" with a bottle of Smirnoff Ice, any time, any place and he has to get down on one knee and chug it, unless he happens to whip out his own bottle, in which case, you got owned and have to drink both. Naturally we assumed that such events were taking place on Wall Street, but at places where it wouldn't be such a huge deal if you got caught by someone much more senior than yourself, such as Citi, where they're practically daring their employees to pull this kind of shit. It wasn't that we imagined Goldman Sachs had more important things to do– front-running clients is really not as difficult as people would you have you think, seriously, try it some time– but that they'd have more sophisticated drinking games to play. The same thinking went into our answer to the question, "Do you think there've been any icings at DE Shaw," which meant that for only the second time ever, we were proved wrong

Fortune has learned of icings at Florida-based investment bank Raymond James (RJF) and New York City hedge fund D.E. Shaw.

Not even going to comment on Raymond James, which we figured has been doing this thing since before it had a name. What we are going to harp on is that this is an embarrassment, for the rest of the hedge fund community. YOU'RE GOING TO LET DE SHAW BE THE ONLY ONE?! Unacceptable. You people need to rectify this and fast. Citadel, Tudor, Kynikos, Appaloosa, RenTec, Harbinger, Ping Capital, SAC– you should have a bottle down your pants and be ready to whip it out on a colleague stat. Make this happen and remember that if there aren't pictures it didn't happen at all.

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