My Baptism Of Fire

I am sure everyone has their share of baptism of fire when they first started out to work. I will never forget mine. My first major and important assignment was to be a Recording Secretary at a Domestic Inquiry (DI) in a large bank. The accused had committed criminal breach of trust. It was a tough job for me trying to translate the proceedings of the Domestic Inquiry (which lasted 1 week) into verbatim minutes as I was still a fresh Secretary and being a Recording Secretary in a major DI is not an easy job. I had spent days sitting at the computer with an ear plug plugged to my ear as I listened to the proceedings of the DI on the walkman. On the 4th day of transcribing the minutes, I had accidentally pressed some keys on the computer and everything that I had transcribed was gone in a flash…. and could not be retrieved by anyone. That was 16 years ago and back then, there was no Business Continuity Recovery software to recover files. I was really devastated and had to spend the next 1 week or so transcribing the minutes all over again.