My colleague made a blunder with his Excel file and lost two days of work. I wasn’t able to help him recover the garbled data, but before hanging up, he asked me if I could look up data on a separate worksheet in order to auto populate cells based off of a furniture tag on the main sheet. That quickly lead to a MS Teams call on a Sunday evening and a couple google searches later I hit the jackpot and save him two more days of labor.
The tip of the iceberg was two grown men hooping and hollering about a successful excel formula.
This moment was only possible with the powerful suite of technology in our homes. The laptops, the broadband, and our newfound familiarity with video calls. A simple text on a cell phone became a full blown weekend meeting in a few minutes.
Under that were years of tinkering in Microsoft Excel, starting when my dad showed me formulas on a spreadsheet while I was in junior high. Normally, I’m not really into tech, but I’ve always had a soft spot for Excel. The spreadsheet is such a seductive way to numerically model the world. I’m nowhere near a ninja, but I’m in the upper percentile compared to other architects. I’ve never taken a formal course, but every time I’ve run into a question, I’ll make that extra web search to lock in the answer. Every little moment accumulates into a decent library of knowledge and an easy ability to search for what one doesn’t already know.
And then there is my relationship with my coworker. We first met at a previous firm and worked together for a couple years. He moved on but soon invited me to pursue this gig with the state. We come from different worlds, but we’ve always had an bond with each other beyond the transactional relationship.
We’ve always had each other’s back, especially on a quiet Sunday evening as the kids are wondering why daddy started dancing around the home office.