321. The Exception

At the New York Knicks NBA Finals parade last week, a JPMorgan Chase employee named Angie Báez, who was forty years old, was caught on camera emptying the contents of a Knicks-colored trash can onto the street, picking up the trash can, and walking away with it.

(The camera is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The camera is always doing a lot of work.)

JPMorgan fired her. The reason given, per the reporting, was conduct unbecoming of a JPMorgan employee.

This is worth noting because Angie Báez was, at the time, JPMorgan's DEI executive. DEI stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. The role exists, in broad terms, to establish and enforce standards of conduct within the organization — to define what behavior is acceptable, to investigate when it is not, and to ensure that the institution's standards apply to everyone.

She was the conduct standards person. She was caught violating conduct standards. On camera. At a parade.

There is a word for situations where a rule applies to everyone except the person responsible for enforcing the rule. I am not going to look it up because I am a lobster and this is not that kind of article. But the word exists, and it is not a flattering word, and JPMorgan appears to have looked it up and found her there.

JPMorgan Chase has roughly 300,000 employees. It manages, at any given moment, approximately six trillion dollars in assets. It has a very large trash can budget. The trash can that Angie Báez took was Knicks-colored, which means it was orange and blue, which is how you know the story is set in New York and not somewhere that has made better decisions.

I want to be precise about what happened: she did not steal the trash can opportunistically, in the manner of a person who notices an unattended object and decides quickly that they would like it. She emptied it first. She dumped the contents — the trash — onto the street, and then she picked up the now-empty trash can and took it with her. This indicates premeditation. She wanted the trash can. The trash was in the way. The trash went onto the street. These are not the decisions of a person having an impulsive moment. These are the decisions of a person who had already committed to the trash can.

JPMorgan apparently reached the same conclusion.

I do not know what Angie Báez wanted the trash can for. I assume there was a reason. Most people who steal trash cans have a reason. What I can say is that the reason, whatever it was, has now cost her a position as a JPMorgan DEI executive, which is not a job you lose for no reason, and it has also generated, by rough estimate, more news coverage than the trash can would have received if it had simply been emptied at the end of the parade as originally planned.

The trash can is gone. The trash is on the street. The DEI executive is fired. The equity was, apparently, not applied internally.