“What’s trick or treating like?”
I boggle. “You never went trick or treating?”
“I did,” he says. “But it was nothing like we used to see on TV where the whole neighborhood goes out. Is it true that everybody decorates their houses?”
I scan my memory. “Noteveryone,but a lot of people on our street did, yeah. When we were all little, anyway.”
“Like haunted houses and stuff?”
“Yeah,” I say, warming to the topic. “One year my uncle Bill turned his lawn into a graveyard and got a bunch of teenagers to dress up and jump out from behind the graves. It made the paper.”
“That’s sick as hell.”
I assess him through the screen. “I wouldn’t have pegged you as a Halloween person.”
He reels back, his hand against his chest. “How can anyone not be a Halloween person? It’s objectively amazing when you’re seven.”
An image of a tiny Connor covered in face paint and a cape pops into my head, Halloween enthusiasm radiating off him. Something about his boyishness now instinctively tells me hewas a very cute kid. Or maybe he was a little dweeb. Who knows?
I can tell from the background that he’s in the office, the gray fabric paneling of the call booth giving him away. He’s wearing a cheerful green hoodie today, which contrasts perfectly with the charcoal that surroundshim.
The call booths have theworstlighting known to mankind, yet Connor looks fine. It speaks to the strength of his bone structure that he’s able to look good on camera. I fight a smile thinking about how shocked I’d have been if I came across him for the first time on a video call like this.
“So, shiny new data analyst,” he says. “Are you ready to be inducted?”
“Is inducted a word?”
“It is, and it worries me that you don’t know that,” he says. A second later, his image collapses into a small square and the mirror image of his screen fills my own. He’s got a slide deck locked and loaded. Let the induction begin.
—
Connor’s presentation is as thorough an onboarding as I’ve ever seen in my life. He runs me through the projects the team is working on, the tools they use and the teams they collaborate with most, followed by a—I have to admit, very charming—slide filled with fun facts about my three other new teammates, Ben, Martin, and John.
I halt him when he flicks forward onto the next slide. “Um, excuseme—”
“Yes, Annabelle?”
I try to correct him. “No one ever calls me by my full name.”
“Oh, really?” he says, like I’ve just relayed a piece of information that has nothing to do with him whatsoever. Somethinggives me a strong impression there’s going to be a lot ofAnnabellescoming my way. Even more so now that I’ve alerted him to the fact that I hateit.
Anyway. “I didn’t see your fun fact up there, Connor.”
“That’s because I’m not fun.”
“I see how it is. One rule for the boss, one rule for the rest ofus.”
“I’ll tell you what,” he says gamely. “Pay attention to the last six slides instead of staring off into space and I’ll give you my fun fact at the end.”
“Fine. The fact better be worth it, though.”
“Oh, it will be,” he says, flicking onto the next slide.
The final slides pertain to the reporting dashboard, which is finally revealed to me in all its glory. For the last two years, most of the Jotter crew have been dismantling our platform and finding ways to integrate it seamlessly into Taskio. The final piece of the puzzle is a new reporting dashboard, the building of which was a mammoth task that involved trying to wrangle two similar but separate softwares onto a single system so that everyone in the entire company can measure performance in the sameway.
That was the idea, anyway. Connor’s team has spent the better part of the last year bringing all the data together, creating a single easy-to-use dashboard that every department in the business could access to build their own internal reports. It’s complete. But as yet, no one will useit.
“Since you have so handsomely volunteered to take charge of the dashboard rollout, you need to learn your way around it,” he tells me. “The more you can do with it the better.”
