Day three

My colleagues told me that headlines from major newspapers are read at 7h00 over the airwaves every morning. This means that I need to be in the car by 6h50 since I don't have a tuner in my room. However, the audio system in the car I drive is now functioning only partially -- the CD player is broken, four of the preset station buttons don't work and the tuner antenna is hard of hearing. In other words, I need to make it out of the mountains before I can have radio reception. Getting up at 6h00 is hard enough. Getting out of the house before even 7h00 is more than physically difficult -- it is almost a mental barrier. Needless to say, I missed the headlines again.

In the morning, I attended a press conference reacting to a newspaper article run a couple of days ago. In the article, it said that leprosy patients in Taiwan should not be unreasonably asking the government for compensation -- a comment directed at those who suffered from leprosy after 1962. There was a mandatory and arguably inhumane quarantine of leprosy patients, which was legally abolished in 1962. In attendance at the PC were previous sufferers who were indeed interned after 1962, and they wanted to make their case. At first sight, I thought the story was going to be quite weak and didn't quite know what to write. But when I actually thought about it after work, I realized that it is quite significant in the ongoing battle between those interned and the Taiwanese government. If only I were more familiar with the background before writing it...

In the afternoon, I wrote a supporting piece for the launching of Taiwan's Formosat-3, a state-of-the-art weather satellite that was to be launched the following day from the US. I was to write about its functions, which are basically to gather weather information on Earth and in space, and I tried to make it as simple and close to the audience as possible, but my editor felt it was too simple and put in all the scientific stuff that I can't even read, much less understand. Oh well, I have lots to learn.

After work, I chatted for quite some time with the head of special news programming, who has become something like an advisor to me. She's not quite a mentor, but someone I go to for advice once in a while. We chatted a little bit, but mostly, I listened to her vent about one of her part-timers being blatantly recruited in front of her to the English news desk. By the time she was done, it was already 22h00. But somehow, I wasn't as exhausted as the previous day and drove home without falling asleep. Perhaps my body is getting a little more used to the physical exertion.

Not a bad third day, but still dying for the week to end. Just one more day until my day off......just one more day.....