Power Point

I love charts and graphs.  They help me tremendously. I find them fascinating. I love when someone can bring a graph to life in a way that is revealing. Whatever you think of Al Gore, the moment in “An Inconvenient Truth” where he gets on a cherry picker to show the rise of carbon in the atmosphere in the last hundred years, is the Power Point equivalent of the guitar solo in “Freebird.”

I so strongly believe in the power of a graph, that it got me in a lot of trouble in the delivery room during the birth of my second child. The graph on the machine that was pinging next to my wife was furiously pulsing during her contractions. During a particularly painful contraction, the graph didn’t really react in the way that the screaming implied it should. Mrs. Giles said, “Oh boy that was a big one.” I said (wait for it) “Not according to the graph.” I am very grateful to Mrs. Giles for not burying me in the desert soon after this comment. When the doctor came in to check the patient, in my best “male-to-male-hey-how-does-this-thing-work-tone” I asked him, “Hey, this graph tracking her contractions…” He interrupted. “That? Oh, that doesn’t mean anything.” Again, thank you sweetie, I hate the desert.

In my day job, Advertising, I am referred to as a “Creative.” (I hate the phrase because it “nouns” an adjective. No one is “A Stubborn.” They are only “stubborn.”) Anyway, in my line of work I collaborate with folks who are Marketers, Account Managers, Strategic Planners (they have a hard time explaining that title at cocktail parties) and other folks who rely on charts and graphs to explain things to guys like me who don’t understand things until placed into a chart or graph. Or a pie chart. I LOVE pie charts.

Anyway, one time, many years ago, a smart person explained to me that I shouldn’t be worried about the steep arrow pointing DOWN in sales figures. “Why not?” I asked. He replied, “Because we are declining at a slower rate than the competitor.” I said, “So in other words, we are falling out of a plane with no parachute at a slower rate then the other guy?” He said, smiling, “Exactly.”

I love charts and graphs.