Buddy story · Opposites
The spreadsheet and the shrug
Dora charts everything. Ray charts nothing and is faintly appalled by charts. It has worked for nearly two years.
- Paired
- November 2024
- Cadence
- Thursdays
- Status
- ongoing
The pairing was a joke that Ada made and then thought better of and then made anyway. Dora had arrived with a workbook of tabs; Ray had arrived with the sentence "I take it on a Sunday and I do not think about it again."
What happened was not that either converted the other. Dora still charts. Ray still does not. What happened is that Dora found somebody who would look at a fortnight of her data and say "that is a fortnight, Dora", which is the thing her own head could not say, and Ray found somebody who would occasionally point out that the third time he had mentioned a symptom in passing it might be worth mentioning to a doctor.
He did go, on her nudge, about the reflux. It was nothing serious and it was treated and it stopped, and he has been quietly grateful since in the way of a man from Barnsley, which is to say he has never mentioned it again.
I need one person in my life who is not impressed by the spreadsheet. He reads it like a weather forecast for somewhere he is not going.
She noticed I had said the same thing three Thursdays running. I had not noticed.