The pen isn’t faster than the sword

Today was my first steering committee meeting--maybe 25 people on a call for 90 minutes. My job was to take minutes for 90 minutes. I was going to do it on my laptop but, just before the meeting was to begin, Word shifted into some format that shrunk my pages and took away the zoom function. Every page was 40% instead of my preferred 150%.

So I took long-hand minutes. The meeting ended at 9:30 pm my time (accommodating San Fran and Sydney). I started typing up my eight pages of chicken scratch, going until 11 pm. I will get up tomorrow at 5:50 a.m. and start typing. Minutes are meant to go out the day after the meeting. I finished typing by noon my time (tomorrow) and sent them to a guy in Boston to review. It is humbling to realise I can't keep up. Some sentences I got 50-80% of what was said and guessed at the rest, not always correctly. There were parts of the discussion that I couldn't follow. I just couldn't figure out what the conclusion was. Luckily, my Boston colleague is better at this than me and he filled in the holes.

Tomorrow my day will conclude at 6 pm and I will be so tired, I will be dizzy. But also very pleased to have survived my first steering committee meeting, having gotten out the pre-meeting packet and the post-meeting minutes. No other meeting will be as tiring as this one, when I've had so many technical stumbles. More chocolate cake for me!

Jan. 17