22 Apr A Short Story: Graph

*This story is entirely a work of fiction.*

I was spending some time with this girl I hadn’t seen in awhile… maybe because sometimes I’m blind, or maybe just because sometimes neither one of us have the time, but on this particular day, we rendezvoused and lost track of time.

I was telling her how much I appreciated how every time she comes to see me, she always looks so beautiful; she never misses the potent silhouette, with the nice smile and outfits that look like someone hand-stitched the fabric to her body. She always opens her heartbeat to me also and that really gets me to be sweet.

And I don’t typically like to be sweet; there ain’t nothing sweet about me.

She’s a very smart girl, proper, classy, a bit freaky, but she definitely has the type of gorgeous beauty that’s almost like her sole purpose for being born was to be looked at like an art piece.

 I would tell her that in person, but she probably would just roll her eyes.

Anyways, back to the story,

On this particular day she came over to my house and asked me what I was working on. I was sitting at my desk with a few sheets of graph paper in front of me. She doesn’t normally ask me what I’m working on because she knows that I always end up showing her anyways, but I think the fact I had graph paper in front of me had her interested enough to ask.

Her heartbeat also sounded very delicate, which is unusual for her.

So, I ignored her question at first and said to her (without looking up at her as I know that she doesn’t like when I do that), “ Why you looking so good in your photos recently?”

She blushed, rolled her eyes with a bothered sigh (like I had expected) and she turned around to leave, but I stopped her quickly and said, “This company… had said they were having issues with one of their teams, roughly 100 people in that department and asked if I had any input…”

She stopped walking away, turned back around and quickly walked back over to my desk… I knew she wasn’t going to leave. She took a seat and I finally looked up at her and handed her the piece of graph paper I was working on.

Like I said before, she’s a very smart girl so she was examining the paper with a type of business prowl… she looked really sexy when she did that. After a few minutes, she looked at me, with very soft eyes, softer than I have seen her look before, and said to me, “What exactly is this for?”

So, I stood up and started to walk, circling around her, which is what I typically like to do when I want to explain something and I said, “I had everyone a part of that team send me what they thought the biggest issue or area of concern they had was. Then I took all of their input and randomly wrote them down on a grid. I purposely chose a grid format because there is no sense of prioritization when reading through it. So, I plan on sending this grid to each of the members of that department with the request for each of them to go through and prioritize those issues… you know? Like to tell me which are most important, least important, stuff like that.”

She looked at me slightly confused and said, “Don’t you think that’s sort of redundant?”

I stopped walking around, took a seat next to her and then said, “Actually, quite the opposite. It’s impossible to solve any sort of problem without first understanding how everyone thinks…”

She again looked at me confused, yet also amused, but said to me, “By having them prioritize issues?”

I smiled and continued to say, “It’s more simple to that. For example, some people when they return this grid to me will either number each of the issues on the grid I made, or some may draw arrows, or some may write the issues as a numbered list, or some might even re-create their own grid or some might create their own type of diagram. Does that make sense?”

Her heartbeat quickly changed to a thumping sound and she said to me, “Sort of…?”

I then moved in a little closer so I was talking directly into her ear and said, “The way people return requested information to me is important because it tells me what their thought process is, how they think, how they approach problems/projects. There’s no right or wrong way to return that grid to me, but the way they decide to formulate that requested opinion, more than thoroughly explains to me how each person thinks… once that’s understood, then I can offer input on how to alleviate the dysfunction.”

She turned and looked at me with slightly watery eyes and subtly whispered to me, “You know I like when you talk like that…”

I like to keep her amused, when she’s with me so I pointed to a window in my office that looks out to a few trees outside and quietly said to her, “Look at that tree. How many shadows do you see?”

She smiled in a way that her nostrils kind of flared, which is how I knew that I hit the right spot with her and she said said to me, “One… why?”

I stood up, walked to the window and said to her, “I see many. And that’s a real problem.”