Recording the Meeting

I just came back from a meeting. One of the meeting participants is a manager with a quite busy schedule, hence he could only attend the meeting for several minutes. He still needed to be there and he needed to present his instructions quickly. So he asked us to pay full attentions to his speech, not taking any notes at all. He said we could take notes of what he said afterwards, but we must not miss any points of his.

Well, that is tough for me, being invited to the meeting at the last minute only without any preparation. Moreover, this morning my mind was (and still is) on some other problem waiting, which may not seem important to others but important to me (and important to the people which gave me the problem of course). So in a sense, my attention is elsewhere, and I was afraid I could not pay much attention to this manager's speech. It was worse since he also requested us not to take notes. What to do then? Well, an idea came up to me, and I silently recorded his speech on my O2 Xda IIi PDA Phone (the recording software being part of the bonus software bundle installed by the PDA Shop staff from which I bought the device two years ago). During his speech I could then mind my own problem without paying too much attention to him. I do not have to worry about missing his ideas too, since I can review them later at a more convenient time. Once again my PDA has saved me :-)