Thursday, September 30, 2010

Pie Charts

I just received a Powerpoint presentation for a meeting to discuss a project status (of COURSE the meeting is scheduled for 1 hour). As I was clicking through the slides, desperately searching for some kind of point, I was relieved to see that some thoughtful soul had included a pie chart to illustrate a measure at 100%. Yes. You read that correctly. There was time and effort put into the point of illustrating the concept of "all".

Now I do work with some people who are routinely thwarted by the concept of 'Reply All'. And some of these same people are completely unable to cancel a meeting invitation without sending out 3 modified invitations and then finally just sending out an email to ask everyone to delete the original meeting invite from their calendars. But at the same time, I've met cats who didn't seem to have any difficulty at all with the idea of "all". As in, "I'm going to yack up ALL of my dinner onto your living room carpet."

I'm happy to report, however, that the graph was well-received by the group. At least I -think- those were noises of approval. Sometimes it's hard to hear over the cacophony of ill-conceived projects mutating into lumbering, career-devouring horrors.