“Gugigigigi…I won’t lose!!! …VLOOKUP!”
Inoue, who was about to lose the arm wrestling match, decided to process the VLOOKUP instead.
“Hey…what are you doing…”
“Yes! Saito-san, I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to win by cheating just now.”
“That’s not what I mean…don’t play around!!”
“I-I’m sorry…I was just bored. It’s my mistake.”
“Well, it’s fine. How’s the situation?”
“Easy, very easy. VLOOKUP’s have been appearing in the cell I’m in for a while now, this is the fourth one.”
“It might be the same cell for now and it might appear several more times, but once the results have settled down, they will come out all at once.”
Inoue nodded back. How did they know when they would appear? I asked Saito the question.
“What do you mean?”
“Hey, think about it yourself. An Excel worker isn’t just a worker because they can write functions. They also imagine what they want to do when creating a sheet.”
“…That’s true. If a file has just been created, the columns to be referenced aren’t determined yet and there are many cases where people forget to add a $ in order to make a relative reference into an absolute reference. Once you’ve written a formula that you’re happy with, you can copy it to all the other lines at once.”
“That’s what is happening here.”
Saito explained the strategy from this point on.
“Considering the scale of the job, it will probably take 3-4 days. There will be three shifts of four hours each. One person will work. One person will be awake and waiting. If the person working can’t handle something on their own or needs a break, they can call the person on standby. Only if absolutely necessary will the person resting be woken up to deal with something together. Well, for now, Inoue will stay here. Takahashi will be on standby. I’ll take a np, so when it’s time for me to take over, wake me up, okay?”
“Yes.”
“Got it.”
“Here, I’ll lend this to you while you’re on standby.”
Saito handed me a small games console. Inside was the dinosaur game that would appear when Google Chrome couldn’t connect to the internet.
##################
It was a much more in depth game than I had imagined. The only time I had ever played it was when I was at work and the internet wasn’t working. But, when I started seriously playing it, I discovered that it wasn’t just cacti, even pteranodons would fly at me, there was also night time. As the speed increased, if you jumped too late, you wouldn’t be able to dodge the next obstacle. Although I was able to consistently score in the 1000 point range, Saito’s highest score was 4329 and I was unable to exceed it. As I was playing, I received a call from Inoue over the walkie-talkie.
“It’s time to change shifts.”
Play time was over, it was time to work.