I have always hated being interviewed because I do not like being put under the spotlight, but the nature of my work puts me in situations where I have to go through with it anyway despite what I felt towards it.. It always seems like a spoonful of medicine that I just have to swallow & try to forget about later.
A while back, I was ‘asked’ to be interviewed by a respectful English newspaper, & as usual, I used up all my excuses trying to dodge the bullet but failed miserably since they were very insistent. The pesky journalist kept hunting me & my staff down every single day till I had to agree to do it even with all my conditions (no photos, 30 mins max, send me questions before hand..etc).. *yes you can see, I am not really a journalist’s cuppa tea*
Anyway, the day came & I walked into the meeting room where the journalist was waiting eagerly. She seemed human in reality than what I have imagined from her nagging phone calls & flooding emails. I was still feeling uneasy, but drew up a smile & greeted her regardless, after all, I wanted to get it out of the way & get on with life & work quietly. One of my communications coordinators was sitting with me just to make sure she is behaving herself.
The journalist, who was seated next to me, started shooting questions, with a blank notepad in front of her, & a pen ready to fire. As I started speaking & getting more into the topics she questioned, I noticed her eyes fixated at me and nodding her head with every end of a sentence, while her hand was scribbling nonstop on the poor notepad. She was one of those weird journalists, that could be a mad scientist in another life.
As I spoke more, & she ‘wrote’ more, I couldn’t help but look down at the ‘victim’ (i.e. notepad) between her hands. I was suddenly shocked to see a series of weird scribbles that made no sense to the human eye! They seemed more like run down squiggly worms on the lined paper rather than words & letters! At every word I spoke, a new ‘worm’ was drawn on the paper & they were coming out like crazy.. She continued scribbling & flipping for more pages as she flooded each one with those nonsense curves & lines.
I then started feeling offended.
What is she thinking?! Is she mocking me? Are we playing a game here? Doesn’t she know I have much more important things to do, then sit here & play ‘lets be interviewed’!? I started signaling to my coordinator that I am done, & I do not want to continue. She then asked the journalist to wrap it up since we have a meeting to catch up with.
The journalist wanted more, she wanted to feed her notepad with more alien scribbles. I couldn’t help but really want to throw her and her notepad out of the glass window for wasting my time & putting me through this. Instead, I smiled and gradually finished up the interview, then politely excused myself, shook her hand & left the room.
I spoke to one of my comms colleagues about the mad journalist and her alien writing language. He started laughing. For a min, I thought ok its funny, but not really. He told me this is completely normal & infact something quite common with journalists, & is called Shorthand. It is a way of writing that was developed to jot down notes quicker than normal handwriting & was used quite heavily in the past with secretaries & journalists.
I was intrigued, I googled shorthand & realized that there is much more to it. There are institutions that teach it, there have been different schools & categories of shorthand writing, & most interestingly, you can develop your own set of shorthand writing that no one can understand but yourself!
We apparently also use shorthand all the time online, with abbreviated letters & symbols for words. Here is a GUIDE for the largest list of text msg shorthand & Internet Acronyms found. =)
For more information of shorthand, check out these useful sites:
- A Guide to Alternative Handwriting & Shorthand Systems
- Shorthand guides
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You may be wondering what happened to my beloved journalist. I still did not change my mind about her, especially after I realized that her ’shorthand-ness’ extended to her reporting, and the article that came out had many mistakes & gaps of important information that she did not mention.
Until I blog again.. 
