[FMAL-18] In Summary
Why, if it isn't Fondue, and Maybe a Lake, and that little stinker Bernard. Bet you think you're so tough, hey? Because you've written eighteen whole emails?
The summary is where we take every single thing that has been said in the meeting, every decision that was made, every recommendation to every body, and dump it all in one easily searchable place. I printed a hundred and four pages of summary today. Thirty thousand words; that’s a good-sized erotic novella. Today, we wrote and collated the summary, and edited it, and sent it of for copy editing to our boss in New York. It will be the last bit of our reporting. It will likely form the basis of many a diplomat’s report to the capital, because it is way easier to copy/paste our stuff than to write the thing yourself. I should know.
Here’s another kind of summary: Over the course of the Geneva Biodiversity Conference, I wrote sixty thousand words for my job, most of them fine. I sat in three kinds of chair. I was in the conference centre for an average of eleven hours a day. I ate hamburgers twice, pizza three times, and twelve times something called a “falafel salad” that was really just couscous with some lentil balls and a single leaf of radicchio. I used three kinds of headphones to hear translations in Russian, Chinese, Arabic, and some Spanish (though I tried, out of pride, to listen myself to that last one, even if I kind of didn’t get it sometimes). I wore two shirts in constant rotation, and the same blazer every day. My favourite meal was those extra-large ginger and carrot smoothies that the grocery store on the way to the venue sells.
Here’s yet another: yesterday, I took notes for an hour and a half, and then I got a look from my team leader. I got pulled aside. He said, “listen, you need to go. I need you to write the analysis.” Which is a two-thousand word bonus we give our readers, letting them see what we actually thought of the meeting. It’s the one time that it’s useful to have a Ph.D. in this stuff. I heard those words, and I knew what they meant: you don’t have to be in the venue any more. A wild force took over my limbs; I rushed up to the office, packed everything, biked back to the hotel, dumped out and repacked with nothing but a laptop, a bottle of water, and a pair of shorts. And I wrote two thousand words on global biodiversity governance from the sanctuary of Geneva’s premier bouldering gym. Joy of joys.
And another: today, after eight hours in a coworking space with (admittedly) amazing ginger juice and a Brazilian hairdresser plying their trade next to the cafe area, I had forty minutes to jet down to the water and walk in, feeling—for the first time in three weeks—like it wasn’t that cold any more. I stayed in for a good five minutes. I felt every muscle in my back as an individual unit, and couldn’t stop smiling at the cityscape, the rain clouds in the distance, the long meeting in the recent past, getting less and less recent with every minute.
Our summary and analysis will be available tomorrow, for those of you who are out of erotic novellas to read. Tomorrow, you get my thoughts on the conference and what it all means. But for now, I’m off to the greatest gift: sleep without an alarm on the other end.
Zzzzzz,
B