the other reporters glared at her through the glass doors of her courtroom , watching her type away on her machine after hours , perfecting her craft , finding new ways to write more efficiently , new strokes to fit in more words at one time , incorporating in the asterisk key to her outlines and programming her software to translate every single piece of steno into an english word , all the while dressed impeccably at her secretarys chair with no arms the arms get in the way of her flailing elbows when the attorneys start arguing and their speed hikes up to 250 words a minute and she does all this with the coolness and finesse of a gold-medalist ice skater landing her triple axel .