Renewed Purpose with Hesitance

Since I moved back to the Denver area from Colorado Springs in May, I have lost a lot of my "duties" at work.  There are just simply some things one cannot do from home in the same efficient manner in which they were done in the office, so I relinquished them.  But as the months have gone by, and more people have been hired into my department, I've continued to have things taken away from me.  Some days this is a big relief, but most days, I just feel useless.  I wonder why they kept me on (practically begged me to stay), but am thankful for a paycheck at least.  

Last Friday it was decided that I would start taking minutes for our twice-a-week board meetings.  This is a task that I have done everything in my power to avoid taking on since the day I started in my department.  At this point, though, I figured I had nothing to lose - working from home is the ideal situation for a minute taker!  Plus, I've spent countless hours fixing the errors from the other minute taker post-meeting, I was confident I knew the rules and would help others cut back on the amount of time they'd have to spend fixing my product.

My scheduled start for this new job was November 4th, but thanks to a phone company's screw up yesterday, I had to step in for our current minute taker.  I type like 200wpm (that's an estimate of course), so recording the discussions as the doctors rambled on at about 250wpm was no problem. It was after the meeting that I began to hesitate.  I've spent over a year in my current department and have built up a pretty decent reputation despite my young age, but here I was, with a 24-page document in front of me that essentially guides the next day's activities for ALL of our operations staff...and I was nervous as heck.  I am pretty sure I read over the final copy about 6 times, terrified that I'd get pointed out for one little error that I had corrected so many times on other people's minutes.  But really, it's different when you're seeing it all as your own product - all of the words just mesh...nothing looks organized and you start to worry that you plugged in the right responses for the right sections and you count the number of voting members about 7 times (ok, maybe that's my OCD).  It's the oddest thing, though, to be that nervous about something that you KNOW you know how to do.  In the end I am sure I did the absolute best that I could - 1 hour meeting, and 3 hours editing! 

Even with all of this anxiety, it is nice to finally have a project on my plate that isn't going to waver week to week, a rare thing with this company.  Sure, I am cautious as this task could get yanked from underneath me, but seeing as how they hate hiring out because it = more $, I figure I'm in a pretty good spot...for now!