The Printers

Let me let you in on a little secret, books are printed at a printing press. Yup, that is right. Type is set, and the printing is done just like the old days. Well in the business world, lots of things get printed: annual reports, quarterly financial statements, company presentations, and as is the case in my line of work, offering documents. An offering document is usually a prospectus, or a collection of forward looking statements in the form of "a legal document that institutions and businesses use to describe the securities they are offering for participants and buyers" as wikipedia would like to call it.

Some people ask me what I do. Well, I write these offering documents. Actually, I would say my team negotiates, drafts, renegotiates, redrafts, proofreads, redrafts, rethinks, redrafts and proofreads these documents. And most of the work is done on the old word processor from the comfort of our offices, however, putting this 250 page masterpiece into book form is no easy task, and the company will enlist the help of a printing company, or as I call it, the printer.

It is at the printer that things really start to get cooking. Time runs short, as do tempers and sleep. Usually the printing marathon runs between 72 and 100 hours during which people never leave the printer. I have managed to get home for about 7 hours in the last 3 or 4 days, and it is a weird feeling when you can't remember what day it is, when you got to be where you are, and you really don't know when you will ever leave again. There is a shower with all the amenities, and the bathroom counter is fully stocked with toothbrushes, toothpaste, deodorant, axe body spray, razors and shaving cream, and even q-tips. Meals are served three times a day, and there are staff here to set a new cola, red bull, sparkling water, peppermint tea, orange juice, or smoothie in front of you before you even finish the one you have. You literally never have to leave the room.

The printing process is rather intense, but simple. The printer sets all the type. The problem with a document this long, and one that is changing with every passing day and is constantly being renegotiated, is that the type has to be set long before the actual printing is done. Once the document is sent to the printer for setting, all changes are made by hand, scanned in, and the proper changes are made. Then the proofing begins, each change is double checked to make sure it was done correctly, the hyphen was inserted rather than the dash, or the quotation marks were accidentally set in bold face and will have to be replaced. Longer changes take hours to be made, and while one page is being reworked, no other changes can be made to that page. Because of my native English abilities, I hold the master document, the one with all the most recent changes and the only one from which pages are submitted to be changed. As pages come in and out the huge pile of papers shrinks and grows in front of me: a living document! It is quite stressful keeping up with all of the proofreading as pages come back, making sure no changes were missed and that they were all done correctly and juggling the task of consolidating changes from 12 lawyers, 14 bankers, 25 company representatives, and the changes I make myself as I read through the text.

Needless to say, the paper builds up. In fact, had I had those trees, I think I could have built a little treehouse. Luckily there was a German soccer game on tonight, so the changes stopped rolling in for a few hours and I was able to catch up and write this blogpost, but it looks like break time has past and looking at the clock it would seem Day 4 at the printers has already begun...

Back to work. But before I go. Let me tell you how delicious that steak was. Very delicious, and even more delicious when I realize that little spread from Buzzano (http://www.buzzano.de/) cost over 100 euro. The company gladly picked up the tab for the poor soul who worked through the soccer match and won't be leaving until after they wake up tomorrow.