All together, now:

Exhale.

It's all over. The big event for which I wrote speeches. Right now, tens of thousands of folks are on their way home. No more speeches. No more crises (we hope). No more having my cell phone posted in everybody's office next to a hammer and a sign saying "In case of emergency, break glass."

Over the course of these events, I was called upon to serve in several capacities, in addition to my speechwriterly one. One thing I was asked to do was escort some VIPs around the office, showing them the sights, as it were. I spoke their language, they spoke mine, it was all good.

Except it wasn't. Because they were jerks.

You see, I am young. And female. And I work for an important man. Which means, clearly, that I am his secretary. And of course, it is perfectly acceptable to treat secretaries like dirt.

So when we got to the president's office, and they starting poking around his desk, they ignored me when I asked them (politely) to desist. And when they started moving around the furniture so that they could all sit behind his desk, they didn't seem to hear anything I said on that subject, either. (Politely--always politely.) And when one of them, seated behind a desk that was not his in a chair that he wasn't supposed to have moved, holding a pen that didn't belong to him and pretending to sign papers that he shouldn't have been looking at, actually

handed me his camera and told me to take a picture of him,

I think it is evidence of incredible self-control that I did take his picture. With a smile on my face. And, when instructed to take another one, because he'd come all the way from his country to get this picture, and his friends would die of envy when they saw it, I obediently took another one.

And they're both lovely shots.

Of the practical, neutral, utterly generic beige drapes just to the left of his ear.