We had the monthly export kilos in a notebook. What we did not have was a drawing that showed the autumn stall against the three years before it. The desk sent six sheets and a sitting. The corridor chart is the one the cellar master still points at when the board asks whether to hold the bottling.
After the sheets were hung
Letters after the sheets were hung
These notes came after a sitting or after a corridor chart had been up long enough to be argued with.
Praise that names no sheet is of little use to the next client. The letters below refer to work the desk actually hung. One of them records a refusal. That is as it should be: a forecast range is a sentence we have to live with after the sitting ends.
The first sketches used a coarser monthly grain than our own ledgers, so we asked for a weekly overlay. That second pass was the one we hung. The sitting ran long, and two directors still wanted a tighter forecast sentence than Nino would write. I was glad she refused. The range on the sheet is the one we can defend in a bad month.
Our association kept hotel-night figures in three spreadsheets and a cardboard folder from 2014. Giorgi lined up the district change and marked the pandemic break instead of smoothing it. The wall now has a chart the membership can stand in front of without pretending 2020 was a normal winter.
I booked a board reading with charts we had drawn ourselves. Elene spent the first quarter-hour saying which axes could not be compared. It was a drier hour than I had sold to the chair, and it saved us from a motion based on a stacked bar that mixed fiscal years.
The seasonal sheets for the military-road passenger counts arrived in time for the March meeting. I would have liked a fourth chart for weather delays. They said the delay series was not in a form they would draw. Fair. The three we hung were enough to stop us staffing the information booth on last year’s pattern.
Longer accounts
How a briefing ran, start to finish
Export kilos and a bottling date
A Kakheti house asked whether autumn loadings had broken their usual rise. The source list mixed cellar books with customs kilos at Poti. The first sketches treated them as one series. The review sitting caught the unit join. The finished briefing kept two charts in conversation rather than one dishonest line. The board postponed a bottling by three weeks and kept the corridor chart up through the next harvest.
A municipal folder that was not a series
A district office wanted a ten-year passenger chart from papers that changed definition twice. Archive reconstruction took six weeks and produced eight years with two marked breaks, not ten smooth ones. The committee used the caution sheet in a budget hearing. They did not get the poster they first described. They got a drawing that survived a question from the finance clerk.