The Desk Next to the Restroom: What Goldman Sachs Taught Me About Power

The first time Jack Morrison walked into the lobby at Goldman Sachs, the second hand on his pocket watch had just ticked past nine. He thought he was early. But the coffee machine on the trading floor had already cycled through three rounds, and all six desks by the windows were occupied—by people who had nailed down their spots through summer internships while he was still pulling all-nighters in business school building valuation models.

They gave him a desk next to the restroom, with a screen that caught the glare and a keyboard membrane still stained with his predecessor’s coffee. No one told him why that seat was open. Later he figured it out. The guy who’d sat there got transferred to the London office—not because he lacked talent, but because the head of another group needed one of his own people there. That hole wasn’t left for a newcomer.

It took Jack two weeks to understand: having the skills doesn’t mean you get to sit where you want. The seats are already taken. If you want a place at the table, you wait for someone to leave—or you find another table that hasn’t started serving yet.

By the third week, he’d found one. A neglected client list: a handful of family-owned food companies in the Midwest, small-scale, unsexy, but with cash flows as steady as a metronome. Nobody else touched them. The commissions were thin, the travel was brutal, and there was no prestige. Jack compiled the list into a folder and spent an extra two hours after work on the phone each night. The phrase he heard most: “Goldman Sachs is calling me?” Three months later, he closed his first M&A deal. Not huge, but the fee landed. His chair moved one tier closer to the window, and someone finally left him a cup of coffee after the first brew. He didn’t thank anyone. No one congratulated him. He had simply gotten a seat.

Once he was at the table, he saw its other rule clearly: everyone guards their own bowl.

His direct supervisor was Kevin Brenner, early forties, tie always tied a half-inch too tight. At the quarterly review, Kevin took Jack’s entire proposal for the food deal and presented it to the managing director practically verbatim. Didn’t change a word except the pronoun—every “I” was now his. Jack sat in the corner, watching Kevin’s lips move, pen still in his hand. He didn’t take notes. He outlined a bowl. At the bottom he wrote a number: his base salary plus estimated bonus, divided by the number of dinners he’d had with his daughter that week—zero. He capped his pen. He didn’t say anything. He needed Kevin to stay right where he was, because Kevin’s seat was a buffer—between Jack and the ones below him, and between Jack and the ones above. If he shoved Kevin now, Kevin would fall, but Jack would catch the splash. Besides, Kevin was only guarding his own bowl. If it were Jack up there, he’d have done it more smoothly in the quarterly meeting.

That night he texted his wife: Tell Ella a story tonight. Tell her Daddy’s catching bad guys. After he hit send, he stared at the screen. The moment “delivered” flipped to “read,” he realized he hadn’t been lying to his daughter. He was catching bad guys. It was just that the bad guy’s face looked exactly like the one he saw every morning in the mirror.

Once he could tell his bowl from someone else’s, a lot of anger drained away. He stopped arguing with colleagues about whose model was more rigorous or whose logic was more airtight. Logic didn’t matter. What mattered was who was speaking, and where that person was sitting.

He saw this most clearly at a client dinner.

The client was Mike Rosen, CEO of a mid-sized restaurant chain. Bald, platinum-case watch. After a couple of glasses of red wine, Mike started raging about a competitor who was undercutting him on supply chains and poaching his franchisees with low prices. “They’re playing dirty—it’s destroying the market!” Mike waved his fork, splashing sauce onto the tablecloth. Jack nodded and refilled his glass. What Jack didn’t say: three years earlier, Mike himself had swallowed two regional brands in Ohio using the exact same playbook. At the time he’d called it “market efficiency.” Jack knew this because he’d dug up the old deal memos while prepping the materials. But he also knew who was sitting at the table tonight paying the advisory fees. So he kept pouring the wine and said, “Rules are always broken by the people who break rules, aren’t they?” Mike roared and clapped him on the shoulder. The next morning, he signed an exclusive financial advisory agreement.

After the dinner, Jack sat in the parking lot and pulled out his phone. He found the LinkedIn profile of the founder of one of those Ohio brands. The headline read: Semi-retired, enjoying life. He looked at it for three seconds. He didn’t click. He turned the phone face down and put it in his pocket. As he drove out of the lot, the last guitar solo of Hotel California came on the radio. He didn’t change the station. He just turned the volume down one notch.

People always think they can see this stuff clearly. But when a real free lunch falls from the sky, they still reach out with both hands.

The summer he made vice president, an old friend found him. Tom Hirst, his across-the-hall roommate from college, had bounced through a few things after graduation—a stint in real estate, then a few years in “digital asset allocation,” his social media bio changing vocabulary every six months. Tom asked him to meet at a rooftop bar near the World Trade Center. He ordered a sparkling water—no alcohol—and slid a document across the table.

“Twelve to fifteen percent annualized, principal protected, monthly payouts. I’m not asking you to put money in. I want you to look at the structure, tell me if it’s compliant. If you think it checks out, we could push it together. You know more people than I do.” Tom’s delivery was smoother than it had been back in college when he was selling used couches.

Jack flipped through the materials. A fund pool, an arbitrage model, a hedging strategy—written up prettier than most prospectuses. The principal-protection mechanism was in bold. At the bottom, one line in fine print: Guaranteed by the parent company’s liquidity reserve. He asked, “Which company is the parent?” Tom pulled up an ownership chart on his phone: a holding structure registered in the Caymans, topped by a trust. The beneficiary field on the trust was blank.

Jack took the document home and told him he’d study it.

He spent two days. Day one, he checked every public record he could find and called three former colleagues who’d worked in compliance. The answers all came back the same: on the surface, nothing looked off. Day two, he did nothing. He took his daughter to the Central Park Zoo. Ella stood in front of the penguin exhibit, pointing at one diving into the water, asking why penguins don’t fly. He said, because they don’t need to. The fish are right there in the water. She asked, but what if there’s no fish in the water? He paused, then said, then they’d have to go find fish somewhere else, or wait for someone to throw some in.

“Will someone throw fish in for them?”

“Yes. But you have to ask yourself—why is he throwing them to you?”

Ella didn’t get it. Jack wasn’t trying to make her get it. He just understood something in that moment: the blank beneficiary field on that Cayman trust wasn’t an oversight. It was left blank for the people who truly believe penguins can get something for nothing. He locked the document in a drawer and texted Tom: I don’t understand the structure. I’m not touching it. Tom didn’t reply. Three months later, the fund blew up. It pulled in more people than Jack expected. One of them was a former Goldman colleague who’d been laid off—someone who used to sit by the window too. That guy sent a long, rambling message to the group chat, the last line of which was: “I thought this time it was finally my turn to eat the cake.” Jack didn’t reply. He just scrolled up in the chat history and saw that the last time he’d spoken to that colleague was a mass holiday greeting the previous Christmas. He closed the chat and typed a single line into his phone’s notes: Cake doesn’t fall from the sky. It comes out of an oven. You have to know whose kitchen the oven is in.

He didn’t send it to anyone. He told no one. Only, that night, he looked at his daughter a moment longer than usual. She was already asleep, the blanket kicked down past her knees, the penguin plush toy from the zoo tucked into the crook of her arm. The stitching on its belly had started to come loose, a little grey stuffing poking through. He pulled the blanket up, used his thumb to tuck the stuffing back inside, and placed the penguin back in her arms. After that, he sat on the edge of her bed for a while. He thought about nothing, and he thought about everything.

The next morning, he walked into the Goldman lobby as usual. The red light on the coffee machine was on. His seat was still by the window. He sat down, replaced the keyboard membrane with a fresh one, and opened the Bloomberg terminal. He began scanning for a new table—one he could get a seat at.