What exactly you DO here

So, the job.

I work in London, in the eighth-floor (I know -- there's a lift and everything) offices of an American firm that provides real-time data, news and analysis for various financial sectors. Earnings reports, corporate announcements, that sort of thing.

I'm a copy editor, which means I have responsibility for fact-checking and copy-editing articles in my particular areas, which are European banks/financial services firms/insurance companies and international (Europe/Asia) real estate. In other words, things I don't necessarily know all that much about -- though I know more than I did last week.

The demands are pretty high -- there's a highly automated system of error-checking and a built-in rating system that has me both being rated and providing ratings, the latter mostly for the extensive numbers of writers on which the company relies in India and Pakistan.

It's a good office to be in -- I'm the only copy editor, and a good number of the people in there (who number 15-20) are sales guys. There's a handful of Americans, a handful of Brits and a handful of folks from various other places. The guy who sits next to me is Dutch, and the guy who sits across from me is French. (They're also both younger than I am, as are a lot of the rest.)

My boss and the rest of the copy editors all work in the U.S., mostly in Charlottesville, Va. (where there is, incidentally, an outside chance I'll be sent for a quarterly new-employees meet-and-greet type thing. I asked jokingly if I could go and was told it's entirely possible. So ... yeah, that's kinda neat.) That means for the first five or so hours of my day, I'm pretty much on my own with copy editing.

The offices are in London, and that does mean a couple of hours on the train each morning and a couple of hours each evening. So far I use the morning to read the entirety of a newspaper and the evening to read one of the free evening papers that you can't walk five feet without someone trying to hand you. I need to be slightly more productive with the evening time, but I'm finding I get to work in the mornings feeling pretty awake. My colleagues all think I'm nuts, but for now at least, it's the best thing. Cheaper than rent, and I actually know people here.

So far it's just been training, but as of tomorrow I'm expected to be able to jump in the deep end and swim, as it were.

It's definitely a good opportunity, though, and one that seems to have been worth the wait. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to be able to wait for a good job to come along. Given that the clientele is mostly American, however, it does render all that practi(s)e I did on writing in British kind of ... well, useless.