Page 72 of Semantics

“I suppose that’s because I anticipate being the last one there. I’ll be the one sitting on the couch, watching TV, and eating ramen like a twenty-one-year-old, while they’re all at home with their significant others.”

“That sounds pretty bleak, Vi. Maybe you should recalculate that a bit.”

“Recalculate?” Violet laughed.

“Yeah, your future. Have a little more hope than that, at least,” Stella suggested and reached for Violet’s thigh to give it a squeeze.

When they got to Violet’s house several silent minutes later, Violet grabbed her bag from the floor and said, “Call you later?”

“Yeah, sure,” she replied and then watched Violet walk to the front door of the house, unlock it, go inside, and close the door behind her before she drove off to get to work.

CHAPTER 21

“That chart is wrong. It should be a bar graph. I want to show the differences between them with different colors.”

“A line graph has different colors, Violet,” Sarai said as they both stared at the flat-screen TV they used as a big monitor for meetings like this one.

It was mounted to the side wall, and they could all turn their chairs and watch someone, usually Violet or Sarai, present something. Violet had it hooked up to her laptop right now, and she was standing up next to it, pointing to a slide in her newly improved investor deck. Now that the meeting was actually set, Violet’s brain was going a mile a minute, and she couldn’t stop it. She’d already redone this chart in front of them in three different versions.

“Yes, but they’re thin lines. A bar graph will show new customers versus existing ones better, plus how many customers we anticipate based on download rates. This is just for the app version. I have another slide that I think can work with the line graph for the browser version.”

“I know. I made it,” Sarai replied. “And we’ve already made a ton of changes, Violet. How many more should we anticipate before we can actually start practicing the presentation with the final deck? We don’t have a ton of time here.”

“I know. But it has to be perfect. Arlowe, where’s the data on the languages you owe me?”

“Almost done. I’ve pulled everything as of yesterday. I need to put it in a spreadsheet for you, but do you want it up to date for the day of the presentation? Enya is working on adding Afrikaans level one, which should be launched by the time of the meeting. I don’t know how many users we’ll have trying it out, but it would be good to show that we have at least one more language, right?”

“I would imagine so. We have all the major ones.”

“Not Hindi, but that’s up next,” Enya said. “We’ve got nine of the top ten spoken languages in the world. Well, that’s not exactly one-hundred-percent true because assigning how many native speakers to a language is nearly impossible, and then you go into languages versus dialects of, and that’s contested all over the place. Think of Chinese. It’s really a family of languages that we all just lump together into one category. Hindi is used as a catchall to cover multiple dialects and subdialects. Besides, the data is collected from all over the place, population always changes, and we haven’t done the work to verify it. If I just go by the top ten that are most universally spoken right now and not only by native speakers, we have English, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, French, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian, and Indonesian. Hindi will be available in the next few months. The manual work on my part is done. Arlowe has to do the rest, but the language science is sound for all of them, and that’s on top of all the other languages we have in the app and in the browser.”

“That’s good, but other translation apps have what we have,” Violet stated.

“True, but most aren’t as good,” Enya said. “A lot of them are just cobbled together at best. There are only two on the market that boast as many languages and are as solid as ours. One is far superior because they’ve been around for a while. They have a ton of users, the best gamification I have seen, and a brand name, but that’s all they do. The browser version is fine, but not as advanced as ours, and they have no plans to get into hardware.”

“Neither do we right now,” Sarai noted.

“We have plans. We just haven’t done anything about them yet,” Violet pointed out. “We should include more on that in the deck; more about the wearable.”

“Violet, by the time we’re done making that thing, technology will be so far advanced from where we started, that we might have to start over,” Arlowe suggested. “I want to make it, but I don’t know that putting it into this deck is a good idea. Maybe we can mention the concept, but not go into detail, or even keep it in our back pocket and bring it out if we need to.”

“What sets us apart, then?” Violet asked. “I mean, really, if we think about it, what sets us apart? We’ve been at this for pretty much the past ten years, and we have an app that we say is the best, a great browser version, and plans to do more, to do something that will revolutionize language, but we’re still here, about to beg someone who turned us down years ago for money just so we can stay in business.”

“Our monthly subscribers are going up, and our week-over-week downloads are up, too,” Sarai pointed out before she pressed a button on Violet’s computer and moved them forward to another slide. “See?” She pointed to the graph on that page. “Violet, the numbers are good. Yes, they might be slowly moving that way, but they’re showing progress. We just don’t have enough money for a massive campaign. I’m doing the best with what we have here, but in order to build a brand, we have to get attention. Maybe influencers, bigger and better ads, a celebrity cameo, something beyond just a few basic ads about language translation. I’d take a mascot of a cute animal over our logo right now. Anything will help at this point.”

“So, because we don’t have enough money for a celebrity, we’re failing?” Violet pressed.

“Not what I said, and you know it. Will you chill? You’re making me want to bite my nails, and I haven’t done that in years.”

“Hell, I’ve never smoked a cigarette, and she’s making me think about taking it up,” Arlowe added.

“Violet, we’re going to be okay,” Enya said with a soft smile.

“Are we? It’s, like, seven o’clock, and we’ve been at this all day. We haven’t made a ton of progress.”

“Excuse me. I redesigned the whole template because you said we needed more blue on the slides. I’ve also changed the charts and graphs at least a dozen times,” Sarai noted, pointing at the screen.

“The pitch. You know what I mean, Sarai. The pitch is basically the same as it was seven years ago when they turned us down.”