Jonola14

THE PHOTO-STROPPIER

“Come ON for goodness SAKE” I hissed as I stood next to the infernal machine waiting for it turn to churn out my long overdue report. I’d been working on the damn thing for the past four hours, the deadline was about two minutes away and the last thing I needed was the wretched print-out to take a long time in appearing.

It had taken me SUCH a long time to work out why that Pivot Table wasn’t returning accurate data and why as a result the performance and turnover information I had been studying seemed desperately low and just would not match the figures generated by my colleague. Not only that, but the vlookups had been a bit of a challenge, particularly as the if(iserror) formulae in the midst of the lookup complicated things even more so. Having immersed myself in Excel spreadsheets for the fourth day in a row, my mind easily slipped into how the file I had been working on was constructed and how the separate worksheets interlinked. I stood there in a daze whilst my mind cast itself back to the 27,000 lines of data I had sourced from the invoicing files and how I had created a detailed, colourful and, finally, accurate report under quite a lot of pressure. I began to question myself, was the data right? Did I do that chart correctly? Is the year on year data undoubtedly correct considering the permutations it is subjected to?

“Come ON!” I growled and aimed a kick at the bloody thing. Not that the kick would have done anything, all I was doing was taking out my irritation on the paper trays. Thirty seconds to go before I had to have the report on the head of department’s desk and the damned printer STILL hadn’t got round to spurting out my report.

I tapped the screen, then knocked it harder until it yelped and protested with a defeatist whirr and a click. “BLOODY THING!” I seethed as I took a deep breath, unclenched my fist and inhaled a long, deep breath.

Whoops. That would explain it.

I took a step to the right, picked up the three crisp pages sitting proudly on the printer and offered my sincerest apologies to the photocopier.