I said "board", not "bored"

Well, I have survived my first week in the new job. Last week was kinda crazy, since the Board was meeting on Wednesday and Thursday (nothing like jumping in with both feet...) Monday I tried to acclimate myself to stuff. I helped my boss follow up on the status of the briefing books that had been sent. I helped finalize hotel check-in arrangements. And I unpacked. I started trying to transfer files from CD's and my thumb drive, only to find that the desktop PC in my new cube has no USB port and that the CD drive is not working. Tuesday I tried to anticipate what Wednesday and Thursday would hold. I skimmed the background documents so I knew what was going to be discussed, and I read old notes to see how I was supposed to capture what went on. The former secretariat support staff compiled very, very detailed notes. To the tune of 20-40 pages per meeting. With a guideline of making sure that every member was mentioned at least once during each day's discussion. Thankfully, the new board and new legal person in charge here have a different view of how things should be (starting, much to my relief, with not audiotaping meetings. I hate trying to transcribe meetings from recordings.) I also spent a chunk of Tuesday trying to get my loaner laptop to connect to the Internet, since I would need to transfer files from either my thumb drive or the hard drive of the laptop to my desktop and departmental network drive. Thankfully, the help desk actually did provide some help, and I got a new CPU as well as having my tech support guy fix the screwy configurations that the last borrower of the laptop had put in place. Wednesday was OK- I arrived at the office at 7:00 so I could meet and greet the board members and provide back-up for all the stuff that pops up during meetings. I made copies of things that needed to be circulated, I called staff members to alert them of schedule changes during the course of the day, I made dinner reservations for the CEO and meeting chair, I called a taxi for our consultant. Isn't it good that my college degree is being put to good use? Thursday was my trial by fire. I had to be at the hotel by 6:30 to prepare for meetings to start at 7:00. We had a series of committee meetings, followed by a full board meeting beginning at 11:00. So, I arrived, bright eyed and bushy tailed, at 6:15 and helped check the A/V set up and waited to folks to arrive. Some other staff filtered in for the 7:00 meeting. 7:00 came and went with no committee members arriving in the meeting room. Long about 7:25, we found out that the committee had chatted over the dinner the previous evening, and decided that they could bump the meeting to 7:45, which means I could have slept for at least another half hour. Many of the committee meetings dealt with stuff that flew right over my head, so I just madly typed what sounded like important phrases to be put verbatim into the final notes. The full meeting rolled along as planned with few glitches, although we did get a bit behind, meaning we needed to have a working lunch. The problem with being the notetaker in a working lunch (hot plated lunch, not sandwiches) is that you can't really type and eat at the same time. So, I ate lunch when the meeting adjourned around 2:00. All in all, not a bad first week. My head is kind of spinning, but the board members were friendly to me, my boss is being very supportive and helpful in giving me guidance about what I need to include in the notes and what I can gloss over. And I successfully interacted with a bunch of very important people without saying anything stupid or spilling coffee down my blouse or tripping down any stairs or walking into the wrong room or anything like that. Maybe I'll be OK at this job after all.