GREETINGS FROM DAVOS!!!

Today we have a guest post from my friend Haley Amber Feinberg, Chief Executive Intern at The Business Insider, who’s been sent to Davos for the first time to cover the World Economic Forum. 

Haley is between email addresses as her .nyu account is currently migrating to Gmail (she graduated last week) so please forward any inquiries to me and I’ll pass them on.

Here’s Haley on her first two days at Davos, enjoy! – JB

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DAvOs, sWiTZErLanD: OMG I’m at Davos!  I’ve arrived finally after the worst flight EVAH!  No just kidding, I watched like a million movies on the plane and slept a lot.  But the hassle of transportation between the airport and the resort was totes crazy.  There was like a bus.  My notes are below, I’m not good at Greenwich Mean Time so my chronology might be a little effed up, whatever!

The theme of the World Economic Forum this year is interesting.  It’s called:

The Jig Is Up: Navigating the 21st Century Now That They Know We’re Nothing Special

GMT 14:40  Had dinner last night in the main dining room.  The food here is fancy and gross at the same time, like at a society wedding.  And there’s no sushi, WTF?  DYYYYYYing for sush, oh well.  I sat with a Ukrainian gazillionaire and he was eating some nasty kind of steak thing.  Sooooooper creepy, he kept being like “have you heard about any good parties tonight?”  Umm, no, I just got here, Ukraine Jones.

I called my boyfriend Scott after dinner but then I remembered it was like 4 in the AM in NYC.  He is staying at my apartment while I’m covering the World Economic Forum, my roommate Jaime said she didn’t mind.  That bitch better keep her hands off him.  Just kidding, LOOOVE Jaime.  We’re like sisters.

GMT 03:30  Attended my first panel: “Tolerating the Unemployed“.  Was really boring, played Crackgammon on my phone’s Facebook app the whole time.

Reuters seems to have sent like a zillion reporters here, it’s weird but they’re all so nice to me.  I think because they know I’ll probably end up at Reuters after BizInsider anyway, just kidding!  ROFLMAOANLTTPTIH!

Ryan McCarthy is sweet.  I feel bad for him because he’s like actually attending panels and trying to get news out of them.  I tried to explain to him that panels are just peacocking opportunities for the peeps that get to sit on the stage, duh!  Learned that in school.  I wonder if Ryan and I would have dated if I went to college with him.

GMT 17:48  Seriously, if Maria Bartiromo looks me up and down one more time I’m gonna freak out on her.  I don’t want your job, Money Honey, so relax!!!!!  And I hate that fur hat, you look like a KGB escort.  Just kidding, loooove Maria, she’s such a groundbreaking influence for me.

GMT 19:03  The whole thing with the badges is also superweird.  Everyone has a different type of badge and it tells everyone else whether or not they can sneer at you.  The really old guys all have these white and blue thingies with holograms on them, that’s like the mackdaddy badge that everyone wants.  Then there are white badges which are for the wives of the Big Dogs.  Those women give me the evil eye all day, they’re soooo angry at me and I have no idea why – prolly cause I’m skinnier than them all, OMG Just Kidding!  But I am, and my hair is cuter.  The orange badges are for press and journos.  My badge is orange and it has a black star on it, not sure why.

GMT 16:33  Went to a panel on Capitalism with Ryan this morning, it was sponsored by TIME.  Specifically it was about Job Creation – which was ironic and hilarious because the five panelists were some of the greatest job destroyers of modern times:

• Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan (currently in the process of 40,000 layoffs)
• Carlyle Group co-founder David Rubenstein (private equity! Fires people for a living)
• Ben Verwaayen, the CEO of Alcatel-Lucent (a merged entity formed for the purpose of eliminating telecom workers on both sides of the Atlantic to achieve Patricia Russo’s grand vision of “synergies”)
• Raghuram Rajan, a renowned economist (OK, not a job destroyer but an academic who has never hired anyone in his life)
• Sharran Burrows, the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (Union!  More benefits for me even if it means layoffs for others – I get that one right?)

Anyway, these guys say like 45 minutes worth of useless whatever, now I have to somehow do a slideshow about it.  I might just do The Ten Grossest Things People At Davos Eat For Breakfast instead.

GMT 15:51  My boss Henry Blodget is here but no matter how hard I try to sit next to him he acts like we don’t know each other.  I finally figured out a way to make sure I could always find him though – I just check the agenda and figure out where Arrianna Huffington will be, and Henry is usually a few steps to her left or right.

GMT 07:30  Anthony DeRosa is the coolest guy here, I think he’s also from Reuters but like also he’s kind of his own thing.  I saw him talking to George Soros on the treadmill.  He wanted to Storify George’s workout or something, it involved hooking an iPhone up to the treadmill and shareblasting his heartrate through Twitter and the About.me API.  Soros was like “Kid what the f*ck are you talking about get away from me.”  Two men in black suits came from a side door and asked Anthony to step aside for a chat.  No one’s seen him in 16 hours.

GMT 22:88 I think  Just got back from the Duran Duran Duran concert.  I never really heard of them before until they started playing.  I recognized that Hungry Like The Wolf song from my mom’s Pilates Mix that somehow got synced onto my iPod.  She’s soooo lame especially with her 80’s workout music, ewww!  Ukraine Jones was looking at me the whole concert.

GMT whatever  Going to bed now.  Came back from the show feeling drunk on my proximity to so much power.  Or maybe it was just those Jager bombs T-Geith was passing out.  Still can’t get my boyfriend on the phone and he’s ignoring my texts.  I swear to god if he’s hooking up with Jaime I’ll kill him.

GMT 01:28  Woke up in the middle of the night from the sounds of old-people sex.  Next to my room, from the room above, down the hall etc.  There are so many 70-year-olds running around here late night like it’s Spring Break.  They leave Viagras on everyone’s pillow in this hotel instead of mints.

GMT 06:42  The Occupy Davos thing is kind of cool.  They are trying to build igloos!  But it’s all fake, I found out from this really hot protester guy named Lars that the protest is just a front for drug dealing.  The “protesters” are selling pills and pot at outrageous prices to the conference attendees, it’s a very symbiotic relationship.

GMT 09:00  There are rumors going around this morning that the hotel housekeeping staff is saving the sheets each morning and  salvaging the bodily fluids of the billionaires to sell on the black market – for people to either frame moguls or impregnate themselves with super sperm.  I’m gonna vom.  There’s no way that could be true.  Right?

GMT 12:25  Speaking of frame jobs, the former head of the IMF and one of history’s great lovers Dominique Strauss-Kahn is here.  But he’s wearing a disguise and is checked in under the name Colonel Mustard.  But everyone knows it’s him.  He seems really friendly, he keeps saving a seat for me at every panel.  So nice.

GMT 13:30  ZOMG!  I finally found out what the black star on my badge is about – it means that I’m “sexually available”!  Ewwwwwwww!  So that’s why they made me fill out that extra profile paperwork at the airport in Zurich.  As if I would ever sleep with these creeps no matter how rich they are.  Unless I find out that Scott’s cheating on me – then I would screw all 2500 people here, even the goddamn cater waiters.

GMT 15:00  Headed to my next event: “Connectedness in an Interconnected Connection: How Global Connections are Shaping the Way We Connect”  I’m gonna totally try to catch a nap, I’ll check in with you guys later with the rest of my notes…laterz! xoxo!

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Thanks, Haley!  That was really informative, looking forward to the rest.