About my Job
j^ob  (n.)   A regular activity performed in exchange for payment, especially as one's trade, occupation, or profession.

I often envy people who work at banks or are secretaries or doctors or who repair bicycles. When someone asks them what they do for a living, they can just answer with one or two quick words and the other person will say "Oh, okay!" When people ask me what I do for a living, it requires a fair degree of explanation.

So, in the interest of clarity, I've written this supplementary page which will help explain what exactly it is that I do.

I work for a filing agency called Automated Filing Services Inc. Filing agencies are business that help public companies fulfill their reporting requirements to the government. If a company has shareholders, the government monitors the company's activities. This way, the government can make sure that the company is being honest with its shareholders, and treating them all equally in regards to material information. A company will have to give the government authorities an annual report, a quarterly report, and continuous disclosure about the comings and goings of officers and directors, major business transactions, and so on.

In the age of the internet, all this reporting is done electronically. The United States Securities and Exchange Commission has created a system whereby issuers (that is, public companies that issue stock) submit their documents to the SEC in HTML (web pages). This allows any member of the public to view that company's reporting documents on the SEC web site.

There's just one problem: when it comes to securities lawyers and company executives, computer skills seem to be minimal at best. That's where we come in. The person(s) responsible for the company send us their reporting data (annual reports, etc...) in Word, Excel, or Adobe PDF format, and we convert it into HTML and file it with the SEC.

I used to do a lot of the conversion myself. Today I'm responsible for handling the workflow and checking over other people's work, as well as liaising with clients by phone and e-mail. I also handle a lot of tech projects, like making sure the company fileserver doesn't crash.

That's what I do. Hope you were paying attention, you will be quizzed on it later.