ugh, another day of taking minutes. i dunno how people do this for a living. at least the other meeting had a bit of drama, but today i had to take minutes for a 3 and a half hour meeting with three people going over all the data for the olympic venues. and that was after spending all morning taking the minutes of another meeting. it is hard enough understanding what these people are talking about. they're, you know, engineers, so they speak in sentences that would not actually qualify as english. second of all, i have to be writing at the speed that they are talking. third of all, today there were lots of chinese people coming in and reporting. granted, they weren't speaking chinese, but hearing a chinese person with not great english using engineer talk is pretty damn hard to make any sense of. anyway, i feel really bad, because after three hours i just couldn't do it any more. i mean, i physically (well, mentally actually) could not make myself listen to what they were saying. i ran out of mental energy. i'm just not that smart. i really hope they don't make me do it again any time soon. not that i think i should be spending my days cruising the internet like i was before. that sucks too. i just ask for a middle ground, doing things that are either mildly interesting or so rote that i can let my mind wander while i do them. so yeah, if you want to know what happened in the last half hour of that meeting, don't read my notes. oh also, i forgot to say, in the middle of that long meeting, one of the three people turned to me and said, "i don't understand why they asked you to take notes. barbara (one of the other people) is taking notes, and i bet its a lot easier for her to make sense of what's going on than you. but if that's what [big boss man] wants, that's what he wants." that really motivated me. sorry for the venting post, but it had to happen.