I had long before arranged to be in America at that time, as no one, especially myself, had the slightest expectation that my novel would even reach the shortlist.
What he found there were Russians who had "seen little of the rewards of the new era but felt much of its pain," who lived "without the slightest expectation that anything good should ever come to a people who deserved so much better".
But considering I was running Windows XP complete with all the updates, and have been spoilt by Google's usurpation of the word "beta" to mean "new and fun", I didn't have the slightest expectation there would be a problem.
I did not execute any research on World Book Night or held even the slightest expectation that I would, in fact, become one of 25,000 out of hundreds of thousands of potential book givers.
I think most people's first reaction upon hearing that Anne Carson, who identifies as a poet, had decided to write a sequel to a novel in verse about a quasi-mythical coming-of-age erotic meta-epic was somewhere amidst surprise, excitement, slight confusion, and expectation: a good mixture of whys.
The reading showed an improved short-term outlook ahead of the holiday season and a slight improvement in expectations about the job market.
A slight beat of expectations led to a nice bump in the stock.
However, there is a slight disagreement with expectations at very fine scales.
And the worst part of being No. 1? "I suppose the slight added burden of expectation," he said.
For the year as a whole, Nortel is anticipating a 2 to 4percentt decrease in revenue compared with its earlier expectation of slight growth.
The results of the numerous simulation runs agree with the intuitive expectation that slight changes in the scenario setup lead to only minor deviations in the probability of reception.
