I’ve been on holiday for the past month. Some might say that I’ve been on holiday for the entire year seeing as I’ve not had a proper job, but for the past month I really was on holiday.
We went to Spain so I could run a half marathon and then sort of got trapped on the West Coast of France and North Coast of Spain for a bit before making it to Switzerland for a week. I estimate I’m going to get 11 essays out of it and potentially a long-form narrative poem, but I’ve not written any of those yet, so here’s something I wrote about Microsoft Excel (among other things) last Summer.
Broken Spreadsheets
Part of being proficient at Excel is knowing what to Google when you don’t know how to do something. Which happens pretty much all the time.
And part of that is not getting annoyed when the formula you have copied and pasted doesn’t work. Because it never does. Not the first time at least.
You have followed the instructions to the letter (and the letter matters greatly when it comes to Excel formulas sometimes), but it is still coming up with an Error message. Still not doing what you want it to.
The example you found wasn’t exactly the same as the problem you have, but it was close enough, and you have modified the formula using the rules given to you on the forum, but it still doesn’t work.
So you get back on Google and find another post by a user called PivotTableGuru2003, who despite his name is an expert at even the most recent versions of Excel and not just Windows 2003, and who gives you the vital edge case information you need to fix your issue.
Something like ‘when your array is between 6 and 17 rows, you must add an extra comma into the formula or your computer will think you’re speaking hexadecimal’. Or sometimes there will be no explanation and things will just start working.
The crucial detail here is that it is fundamentally impossible to find this secondary piece of information on the first try. At the very least it will be the second try, most likely the third or fourth.
You can try and trick Excel by clicking on a result at the bottom of the list of search results, and following the instructions therein. If that’s where you normally find the correct option then surely you’d be cutting out the middleman by going straight there. Alas, it doesn’t work like that. On this occasion the right move was to plump for the top answer.
Unfortunately, there is no way to know which is the optimal forum for any given problem, and indeed this shifts like the staircases in Hogwarts, meaning you will always end up on the wrong floor when making your way to the correct solution.
Or, is this a problem with me? Am I, specifically, a terrible follower of instructions? I’m definitely not the best — I zone out before reading the third step of a recipe and have to check directions several times on my way anywhere because I haven’t paid proper attention to how many lefts and rights I have to take.
But this happens with Excel even when I use all of my focusing faculties, concentrating so intently on brackets and colons as to do myself a mischief. So I don’t think it’s a me-problem in this case.
Could it then be an Internet problem? It promises itself as the Great Leveller — anyone can find out anything and therefore _do_ anything.
But is there just too much information, and the number of possible use cases for any one thing so high, that it is impossible to provide useful and accurate advice for them all?
This, then, isn’t a problem of the Internet after all. And is it really a problem? No two situations are exactly the same, so there can never be one set of instructions for doing something which could perfectly cover all possible situations.
We can do our best, and try to simplify them, to idiot-proof them. But in most cases, things will still not work perfectly the first time we try them. We have to use a level of critical thinking to make things work, which isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it’s a good thing, because that’s the kind of thinking which gets our juices flowing, which makes use of our brains in a way that simply following a rote set of instructions doesn’t.
Why, then, is it so annoying when things don’t work the first time?
I think it’s because we still need to believe that they _will_ work the first time. Like, really _believe_. Despite all evidence to the contrary and the experience of every time we have tried something in the past, we need to have some kind of faith that it will work first time, because why else would we try it?
If we knew that something wasn’t going to work then why would we even give it a go? So we trick ourselves into thinking that there’s a chance something will work perfectly because otherwise we’d never build a functional spreadsheet, or bake a loaf of bread, or put together a table.
Broken Tables
Speaking of putting together tables — we put together a table today. It was a very simple job, no instructions necessary other than ‘screw on the four legs’, but things still managed to go wrong.
The first leg slotted in very nicely, requiring a bit of elbow grease to tighten the screws. The second leg didn’t seem to be playing ball, so we tried the third leg in the second leg’s slot, which worked. The second leg misbehaved in the third leg’s slot, so we put the fourth leg there and tried the second leg in the fourth slot.
All of the slots were exactly the same, so this also proved troublesome, requiring distinctly unfair amounts of elbow grease, and even then it remained wobbly. Back to the drawing board, and a few whacks with a makeshift hammer seemed to do the trick.
The screw still didn’t go in as far as it should have, but the wobbles were stopped, and the table slotted into position, replacing our previous table, which we tried to move into one of the bedrooms, but the angles didn’t work (sometimes there isn’t a solution to be found, no matter how many options you try) so it is now the TV stand, replacing two chairs, which did fit into the spare bedroom.
Making the table was step one of overhauling our interior decor into a style we like. I suppose it’s not really step one, because we’ve done a bunch of things already, like putting in the sofas, a rug, and a bed, but for the purposes of this article let’s say it’s step one.
Step two will be buying some paint, and we’re going to walk to Fort William tomorrow to pick some up. Burnt orange for the living room walls — bright but not blinding. Step three will involve ripping out one of the units in the kitchen so we can put a table (the table which is currently masquerading as a TV stand, in there).
That’s probably not going to be step three, to be honest, because there are a bunch of things we’ll need to do first. Shall we stop referring to the steps with numbers actually, because our plan isn’t that meticulous in detail, and besides, if we try and set out the instructions so tightly then something is inevitably going to go wrong anyway.
Broken Days
In some ways, it felt like today was a waste because I did no writing, and didn’t do a workout like planned. But I had a case of the Mega Sniffles, and spent a lovely morning reading Piranesi — plus we built a table and tidied the spare room. Which was surely a batch of meaningfully spent time.
The whole point of not having a 9–5 is so we can do things we enjoy like reading Piranesi in the morning. And we ate a delicious curry I cooked yesterday with the new pans we got from home which Mum was going to throw out. Then we watched Gravity.
Is that not a day well spent?
Why must even my wonderful restorative life still sometimes be beholden to the vigors of endless productivity? Relax, mate.
Plus, I’ve written this now anyway, which isn’t close to a full draft of an article but it’s The Bones. And I can flesh it out tomorrow when I’m not sneezing so hard. It’s only 400 words but that’s okay. One of my goals was to write 1000 per day when we moved here, but forcing myself to do that when I’m not feeling well — will that help anyone? Or can I just catch up with more tomorrow?
I’m glad I made that prediction about the numbering of the steps earlier because of course we didn’t manage to buy any paint from Fort William. It was an extra half-hour walk on top of the four hours to Fort, but the only coloured paint they had was very muted, and most of what they had was variations on white. I guess most people want boring rooms, huh?
Broken Plans
We walked to FW with a list of objectives. The first was to buy the paint, which we failed.
The second was to buy a book with vouchers we got from the bookshop when we went to see a talk about the reintroduction of wild boar. We didn’t buy a book.
The third was to go to the cinema, which we did, but the film was terrible (Fly Me To The Moon, featuring Channing Tatum as the NASA launch director in perhaps the most baffling piece of casting I’ve seen in recent times. I wanted to award it a 14% score, but Lucy convinced me to give it a boost because we were there for her birthday week, so it’s now up to 21%, which is still the lowest ranking in a long time).
The fourth was to have a pizza, which again we did, but the pizza took an hour and fifteen minutes to come and nearly made us miss our bus.
So nothing went right here either. Our mission objective to buy paint was never going to succeed on the first go. Nothing ever really does. But we have to believe that it will, because why would we try anything if we thought it was going to fail? So we trick ourselves into thinking that it will work on the first try, even though we know it won’t.
But despite all of these things going wrong we had a nice day.
Broken Shower
Until we got home and tried to turn on the hot water for a shower. It didn’t work, so I tried to fiddle with the box and broke the heating controls by ripping the box from the wall.
We did get it fixed in the end, but not that night, of course.
I don’t know why we even tried…