When we entered the room, something felt off. Something felt different from the usual quests. The space also felt more cramped.
Thinking about it for a few seconds, I came to a realisation. This sheet was a graphing sheet.
Normally, a cell in Google Spreadsheets was a rectangle with a height of 21 pixels and width of 100 pixels. As with Excel, cells in a spreadsheet were lined up horizontally. There were times when some text would be written into the cells, but most of the time, it would be data. There were various types of data, such as numbers and peoples’ names, but the size of the cells was set to an aspect ratio suitable for concise data.
Graphing sheets had a completely different philosophy. They were particularly common in government offices and all the cells would be square with one character entered per cell.
This kind of graphing sheet had a very bad reputation among Excel experts. But that was understandable. The job of an Excel expert was to process data using functions. Even such important data would become meaningless if entered into a graphing sheet. The four characters that made up Takahashi (タカハシ) represented the worker, but on their own, the four characters (タ/カ/ハ/シ) held no meaning. There seemed to be experts who specialised in graphing sheets, but I had never met one in my line of work.
“Strange.”
Saito muttered as he looked around.
“It’s awfully quiet. I don’t think a FILTER function would appear in a place like this…what’s going on?”
I also looked around. I couldn’t see a single function on the sheet, that was smaller than usual.
“Nothing is happening.”
As I said that, the scenery around me changed.
it seemed like some sort of image had appeared in the cells around us, but it was too big to see clearly.
“Eh? An IMAGE function? But no one processed anything. What the hell?”
Clatter. I heard the sound of something falling. Turning around, Inoue was lying on the ground. Saito and I ran towards her.
“E…Evi…”
“Are you okay? Shrimp (Ebi)? Were you allergic to the shrimp you had this morning?”
“No, no more. Evi, eviden…ce…”
Inoue fainted. What was going on?
“Hey, let’s head back. Carry Inoue. There’s no work for us here.”
Saito and I carried Inoue back to the car. As I left, I saw an image that looked like a computer screen.
##############
“Tch, they screwed up, that clerk bastard.”
“What was with that quest?”
“It’s a graphing sheet used for evidence.”
“Yes?”
Evidence? What evidence? What did that mean?
“I don’t know where to start, do you know anything about system development?”
“No, not at all. SE just has a bad reputation to me.”
“That’s right, evidence is part of the reason why SE has a bad reputation. Inoue probably collapsed due to her old trauma. Apparently, before she came here, she worked as a systems engineer for contract development. Well, I didn’t think my workplace was great either, but it seemed like her workplace was one where it was common to lose days off and not be able to go home for a week straight. And it didn’t help when the job she was doing was to create evidence.”
Inoue was sleeping in the back seat. She didn’t appear to have suffered any head trauma from falling.
“So, what is evidence?”
“Simply put, the SE engineer will take screenshots of the system they created and will paste them into Excel graphing sheets. They will then send the customer the Excel sheet with the results of every operation captured. If the system meets the specifications, the screenshots will be used as evidence that it is working.”
Was system development that troublesome? I couldn’t imagine it.
“If you wanted to display images, wouldn’t it be easier to use Word or PowerPoint? Besides, why does it have to be a graphing sheet?”
“Hey, hey, hey, don’t ask me. I’ve only heard it from other workers, but they won’t give me a straight answer. All I can say is, there are no functions in a sheet like that. That’s it. Work is done for the day. Let’s go back.”
Saito said as he started the car engine. We returned to the staff area and left Inoue in the medical room. Although it was still early, Saito and I drank beer as he continued to complain about the clerk’s work prediction.
※Material References
Excel Screenshots are Still Rampant | Nikkei xTECH（Cross Tech）
https://tech.nikkeibp.co.jp/it/atcl/column/14/346926/022400848/