I did dismally at shorthand this morning, so it's down to tomorrow. I was fine at the start of the first one, there was even a little voice inside my head saying 'this is easy'. But - maybe as punishment for this hubris - by the second or third sentence it was starting to get ahead of me. After a while I had to leave a gap to fill in later and skip forward, and the torrent of words just continued. When it got to the end I'd completely forgotten what was supposed to go in the gap. We have to get 97% accuracy so that didn't cut it.
Then the second three-minute passage was a fast one so I had no chance, just got frustrated. Because of the higher speed the fast passages have more words so they're exponentially more difficult. I managed to restrain myself from throwing the pen against the wall and storming out, but only got about half of it down so not even worth handing in. By the third passage my hand had seized up from the tension and I was writing at a crawl and making mistakes on the most basic words.
Shorthand's an arcane skill with limited application. Isn't it cool how you can write secret code that noone else can read? Not really, I don't have any interest in keeping secrets. This weblog's partly a diary, partly serving my need to write a lot, and partly to keep everything in my life transparent and make some attempt at explaining myself to the world.
I met the course target of 40 stories published weeks ago and never once needed shorthand to write them (there was one interview where it would have been useful, but tape recorder would have done just as well). By comparison to having to handwrite at least 80wpm shorthand, we're only expected to type at 30wpm. But not passing shorthand = failing the entire course. $5500 and a lot of work down the toilet. That's not counting the opportunity cost of not getting a job for the year instead.
It'd be OK if the shorthand classes weren't so bloody boring. Anyway I guess I'll be practicing furiously tonight, pulling an all-nighter if necessary. Then once it's out of the way I can walk away and never use it again...
Oh, and the Corrections Dept job fell through. While they were busy being out of the office & on the other line & not phoning back they found someone else.
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Posted by fiffdimension at October 5, 2004 05:56 PM | TrackBack