Sara shared her screen. The others in the meeting saw her laptop screen showing a multicoloured bar chart.

"Can you change the colour pallete?" Dean asked, "The blue is a weird contrast to the eyes."

"Sure," Sara replied as she switched out the blue to red. "Not red," Fran said, "Red implies a problem."

Sara switched the colour to purple. "Yeah, looks good," Dean said, "Now can you make the scale wider?"

"You mean made the x-axis longer to have higher numbers?" Sara clarified. "Yes!" Dean replied. Sara tapped on the keyboard and clicked the mouse and the x-axis got a larger number, making the bars smaller.

"Good, good," Fran smiled, "Now can you put zeros on March and April where there is no bar?"

"My god why?" Sara frowned, "Isn't the lack of a bar indicative of nothing?"

"We need to know it isn't omitted, and that its just nothing for March and April," Fran replied.

"Fine," Sara signed, "That can be done by E. O. D." Sara knew this involved having to manipulate the base data to have dummy case numbers and fake dates.

"July's number looks high," Shawn piped in, "is that about right Dean?"

"I think so," Dean replied, "We got slammed that month."

"Alright," Fran adjured, "Sara, you have your action items."

Everyone left the teams meeting. Sara slumped in her chair. 'That was an hour of my life I am never getting back,' she thought.


© Copyright of Shannon Frances Smith 2020