By noon today I was blindly furious, just spitting mad. It was all hormonal--
and knowing it was hormonal, and thus out-of-my-control, just exacerbated my rage. My remedy?
Turn off the telephone, turn up the Liz Phair, and lose myself in an... Excel spreadsheet.
I love Excel. If I could find a job that allowed me to create Excel spreadsheets for eight hours
a day, every single day-- oh wait, maybe I already have that job! If I could find a way to wiggle out of
those damn performance reviews-- or better yet, find a way to quantify my employees' performance inside
of Excel spreadsheet equations rather than some touchy-feely Word narrative-- I would basically have
that job at this very moment. Amazing! I'm feeling better about work already.
I love Excel because it is as anal as I am. If I forget to close the parentheses around a long
summation, it politely reminds me that, in a civilized world, we always close our parentheses.
In fact, Excel asks if I would like it to perform this task for me. But of course! What manners. I love manners.
I also love Excel because it never gets oddly upset with me if I labor over the color of its header rows or the
thickness of its column borders. In my world, numbers need attention. I hear their silent yearnings to feel pretty.
I grant them their wish.
A small wonder, you say? It shines with streamlined clarity and chic urban sensibility? I couldn't agree more.
Productive? Let's not dwell on that. Let's instead consider the success of my homespun, eccentric
therapy in that desperate, eye-of-the-storm time.
And how pretty it is. |
