Meltdown in All Good Things

I want to go home. This is awful. Mostly because I can't breathe. Because the airconditioner in my room has been broken all night and the hotel keep promising to send repairmen and/or the keys to open the locked windows but doing neither and it's hellishly hot and it's pouring with rain outside so I can't even escape anywhere.

During a short break in the rain I broke all the rules to go for a ten-minute walk outside because I couldn't cope with no air and I was so claustrophobic I was on the verge of a panic attack. Lots of air outside, but lots of worse as well, and it turned into a full panic attack because I was reminded of all the horrific things about Africa and why I left and never ever wanted to come back - and I'm trapped here for two weeks doing what's turned out to be a horrific job with defective equipment and no way to replace it and ridiculously long hours and no food to eat but the very expensive and not very vegetarian fare of the hotel. I've never been this trapped in all my life.

As I was finishing that paragraph a very nice man came up to unlock my windows, so although I now have the roar of the traffic (why do they hoot all the time? there's not even many cars on the road given it's a holiday) I at long last have some fresh(ish) air.

Maybe now I'll be able to think a bit. Calm down. Stop panicking.

Yesterday was one of the toughest days of my career....one of far too many.... We started work before 9am and ended after 10pm with hardly any breaks. The hours would have been fine, I can cope with that, but not at the pace demanded. I stenoed 250 pages of British lawyer speaking at - literally - 300 words per minute without seeming to ever pause for breath, which means my fingers had to steno five different combinations of keys every single second! For two hours at a time without even a few seconds of rest.

And then, once they'd finally finished after 5pm, it was the turn of all the Nigerian parties, and although they were much slower I had massive struggles understanding their accents and we didn't have enough microphones for them all (the office sent us seven microphones and not enough cables to reach across even half the room [they also sent us 15 laptops for all the parties to receive their live transcript feeds on, but only 11 cables and only one plug extension block with four plug spaces in it]) so I struggled to hear them, as well.

After we'd finally broken for the day, I discovered that the audio feed coming from the microphones they'd been using as well as one of the British lawyers had been defective so we couldn't even get it properly off the recording to fill in what I'd had to leave out while writing live. So after all that, the nearly 300-page transcript we sent to the clients after 10pm wasn't even close to perfect but had loads of inaudibles...

I was in so much physical pain, though, that I was kind of numb to everything else. By the end of the day I couldn't even get my keycard into the slot on my room door because my fingers couldn't hold it, couldn't receive the signals from my brain about what to do. I kept dropping my fork while trying to eat dinner.

Today my shoulders, arms, wrists and fingers feel like lumps of solid concrete. Even typing this is a struggle since I keep hitting wrong keys and having to delete. My computer has to have a complicated password to turn it on for office reasons and it took me four separate tries to get it right this morning, not because I didn't know the password but because my fingers couldn't put that many strokes correctly in order...

All that's getting me through is the knowledge that, come the end of these two weeks, I'm free for the rest of the year.

But I'm a bit worried now about how I'm going to make it to the end of October with these sorts of hours and the fact that, thanks to Eid, we'll have to work eight days in a row with only one day off in the middle, all with extra long hours. If my body is in such bad condition after just one day, how am I going to keep it going?

This is why I have to stop this fucking job. They don't pay me enough to ruin my body like this.

The shower in this hotel is wonderful, though. I am making the most of it.