Hi Ho Hi Ho

It was Saturday, but I went to work.  There was a meeting of the Research Team of the WIPO/NCC Study on the Contribution of Copyright and Related Rights Based Industries to the National Economy of Nigeria.

The meeting was scheduled to start at 10am.  I arrived at 9:59 and, just as I expected, was very early.  The narrow conference room had barely enough room for the table and chairs and for one person to squeeze along the wall on one side of the room.  This resulted in some people having to actually climb over others in order to take their seats. 

The meeting finally started at 11:30 and ended at    18:00.  At least the chairs were cushy and fairly comfortable.  The table fell apart in the middle of the meeting.  The head of the table had a half-circle extension on it.  The extension was attached by a screwed in bracket, but the screw tore out of the wood on the big part of the table and the extension fell off.  Somehow, the National Consultant running the meeting managed to balance the extension's bracket on top of the big table without interrupting the meeting or dropping his laptop.

Several secretaries were also at work that day.  They brought out coffee and tea, pitchers of water, crackers, sugar and condensed milk shortly after the meeting began.  About an hour later, they returned to collect all the items.  At 3pm, they brought us lunch.  And then after lunch again, they brought out the coffee and tea supplies.  No crackers this time though. 

When we weren't munching on crackers, we could take little sweets from the dishes on the table.  Being my adventurous self, I picked up a little orange and black striped wrapper.  "Tom Tom" it proclaimed.  Inside, a black and white striped candy that smelled a bit like licorice.  I like licorice, so I popped the candy into my mouth.  Yuck.  The black part was licorice all right.  But the white part was mint.  This resulted in a sort of licorice-cough-drop flavor.  I bit into it and tried to eat it as fast as possible.  That was the end of my sweeets-tasting for the day.

The meeting was pretty interesting, even if it was incredibly long.  But it was well-organized and the group knew what it wanted to accomplish, set out a plan for how to accomplish it, assigned people and set deadlines.  I'm excited to see how things progress.