I arrived at the quest location after travelling through a grey tunnel in a small car with a green logo. It took about 5 minutes with Saito driving. When I asked him what the tunnel was, he replied “I don’t know much about it, but it might be fiber optic cable or something like that”.
There was something similar to emergency doors on the sides of the tunnel and Saito and I entered one of them.
Inside was a room with rectangular tiles about a tatami mat in size each. Or rather, it was a room with an infinite number of cells. Hey, seriously, isn’t this just a spreadsheet?
“This will be your first site. It’s a site that’s always used for training though. Don’t worry about it.”
“Quest? Site? What is the official name?”
“Oops, quest is the official name. Calling it a site is just an old habit of mine. People from advertising companies like you would call it a project.
Indeed, it seems that company slaves are people who can’t forget about their work even after they die.
This training site is a spreadsheet used for training in a commercial high school.”
“Heh, these days, even commercial high schools used Google Spreadsheets instead of Excel. The wave of cloud software is amazing.”
I was starting to open up to Saito. The connection between professionals is a scary thing.
“The world hasn’t moved that far. There are only a few training sites. Do you know why we’re here?”
“We? Ah, I see, we are Google Spreadsheets workers. Isn’t that because Google Apps are becoming more widespread in the cloud and companies are starting to use more of us instead of Excel?”
“Don’t dream. We’re a latecomer, we can only use the basic functions without any problems. Well, to be clear, we’re still inferior to Excel with regards to ordinary use. We can’t possibly beat Excel’s easy to use Pivot. Of course, we also have advanced features, such as calculating equations outside of cells, but we’re only just starting to catch up. Our greatest advantage over Excel is our price.”
“Isn’t G Suite about 1000 yen a month? Excel comes with most PCs…”
“You’ve lived a blessed life. This school uses the student’s personal Google Apps to pay for equipment. Because they do that, the software they use is free. The PC is a Chromebook of course. Do you understand?”
It’s a hard world.
“Well, don’t look so dispirited. We’re going to start here.”
Black lines appeared between the gaps in the tiles on the floor like ink seeping out. Two cells next the wall near the entrance turned a dim blue. Apparently, the corner of the room where the entrance was the A1 cell. Next to that cell, the words “sales” emerged. From the location of the rectangle, that would be B1.
After that, letters and numbers emerged. The letters on the floor were a little difficult to read, but it seemed that region names like Tokyo and Osaka were written on them. It looked like a sample sales report from branch offices. It was a scene that would leave an impression on any Excel worker and it was at that time I realised that I was really in a spreadsheet.
“So, what do we do?”
“Wait a moment, if it’s the same as usual, it should be around F2.”
A slimy basketball sized white sphere emerged from the centre of the F2 cell and began to float at waist height. If you looked closely, some letters were written on it.
“This is a function. The job of us workers is to process these functions.”
Saito approached the sphere, placed his hand on it and shouted.
「SUUUUUUUUUUM–!!!!!!!!!!」
※Functions
SUM https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093669