Ten little fingers

T was all about the spreadsheet today. And all about the cold.

You might remember a couple of weeks ago my air con was playing up 19 degrees til midday and then heating up at lunchtime to 26 degrees and almost killing me.

We had engineers in; fantastic. It doesn’t heat up at lunchtime now. It doesn’t heat up at all.

I was thinking back to another life time when I typed and I typed in a typewriter with carbon copies….

When I worked in the bank automation was just starting and we wrote the withdrawal through massive leather bound ledgers. I dropped three of these ledgers on my friend from the top of the stairs one day!

I found out she was snogging someone I was snogging at the same time. I thought ledgers on her head from above might finish her off.

She didn’t even complain. She so knew she was in the the wrong.

In these ledgers I was delighted to write .. I had done debts and credits at school in accounting.

We used to get a report down from head office every four weeks to check the balances in the ledgers.

That was when we discovered I had written all the debits as credits and vice versa.

When I was doing accounts at school I owned ‘the transactions’. So, as the bank I was actually the other side of the transaction but no one actually thought to tell me that.

Imagine though, if we didn’t have spreadsheets. Can you imagine the mess of my desk trying to manage this budget of 60’pages and 360,000 formulas?