Party Vibe

from what I’ve heard he is not a banker but works in IT for finance companies.

Although those jobs are well paid they are nearly always short term contracts and very high stress environments (they use stuff like a mixture of Windows servers linked to IBM mainframes still running COBOL, and sometimes Unix/Linux kit for web facing apps all of which is business-critical and should run 24/7; but it is often still linked by BT leased lines using 30 year old tech and 20 year old equipment; and half the engineering skills/resources used are now in Bangalore and Kuala Lumpur.

It is a miracle any of it works properly at all and there are only a few major crashes each year.

it is not the 1980s any more (in spite of his choice in suits) and inadvisable to consume cocaine openly on the Underground nowadays as there is going to be some bastard who films it and grasses the user up to the press.

They do that because they are too snide to even to take it direct to cops but know the cops will find the footage; indeed BTP now have it (there is an active investigation for it and apparently folk known to the chap have turned his details in to another newspaper).

I can fully understand though why people who have jobs in IT for the London finance industry get themselves into such situations. I moved out of London to avoid this sort of culture.

he is indeed a twat but he would have got away with it in the 1990s – in the early part of that decade there would be no need for such behaviour.

The proper way for an English gent to take his cocaine on the public transport network would have been on the old style slam door train which often had compartments separate from the large groups of seats (DB might have seen these on old TV and films about Britain). There were still a few of these running on London commuter lines well into the 2000s; and until the late 1990s(?) folk could have passed round the cigars afterwards or shared their pipe tobacco (if the windows didn’t have “No Smoking” signs it was reasonable to assume you could smoke there).