Spend enough time on a trading floor, in a corporate finance team or around investment bankers and eventually you'll notice a curious collection of objects occupying desks, shelves and office cabinets.
Deal Tombstones.
Most people outside banking have no idea what they are.
Most people inside banking barely question them.
They sit quietly among family photographs, awards, industry publications and the occasional stress ball.
Small acrylic blocks, glass plaques and engraved pieces of metal commemorating transactions that may have taken months, and sometimes years, to complete.
To anyone outside the industry, they can seem slightly odd.
After all, most professions do not celebrate completed work by placing miniature monuments on shelves.
Yet banking has been doing exactly that for decades.
I've always found them fascinating.
Partly because they seem so normal to the people who own them.
And partly because they raise an obvious question.
Why?
Nobody receives a tombstone for answering a thousand emails.
Nobody receives one for surviving a difficult week.
Nobody receives one for attending six hours of meetings that could probably have been an email.
Yet complete a major transaction and a small acrylic block may eventually find its way onto your desk.
It rarely arrives with much ceremony.
Nobody gathers around to admire it.
Nobody stops visitors and says, "Have you seen my tombstones?"
It simply appears one day and quietly takes up residence on a shelf.
And then it stays there.
For years.
Perhaps that's because it represents something more than a deal.
It represents the late nights.
The pressure.
The deadlines.
The conference calls.
The negotiations.
The moments when everyone wondered whether the transaction would ever get across the finish line.
They also make surprisingly effective door stoppers.
Just don't drop one on your foot.
Perhaps that's why deal tombstones have survived for so long.
Not because bankers enjoy collecting pieces of acrylic.
But because every now and then, it's nice to have something tangible that reminds you:
That happened.
We did that.