Like a five year old I have slight excitement about going to a fireworks party this evening, even though I am slightly scared of fireworks. And don’t want to go out.
It’s looking like my day has polarised into two equal and opposite paths of excitenment. I have spent ALL DAY working on the biggest spreadsheet you’ll ever see.
It’s to work out whether I can afford to ever do the Edinburgh festival again, and the basic answer to this complicated question is “possibly”.
The spreadsheet is over five tabs, it’s got credit card details, savings ((just a tab that says ZERO in big letters), even a summary screen that works out what day it is and how much money I have on this particular day.
It uses VLOOKUPS and everything, I bet you don’t even know what they are.
I do.
It’s even got some inbuilt (by me) error checkings that flash up the word ERROR in red if things don’t add up right.
All the years of temping do have some kind of purpose so it seems.
The problem with doing this is that it turns me into what I imagine an accountant is like, after 5 hours my nose is against the screen and my hair is naturally parting on the side. And I feel a slight bit of jealousy, maybe I would like to be an accountant, it’s easy, things are ordered in numbers, there’s no travelling up and down the country for a ten minute gig. I realise though that this is just a pipedream, I’ve got to do comedy or I’ll have nothing to fall back on.
But then, I am called and woken from my calculator with little printy bit fuelled world and have to go to get my lift to the fireworks, I stop of at Sainsbury’s on the way to get some wine.
I no know that I have exactly £6.52 on my credit card. And no real money. So I think of buying two bottles of wine for £2.99 each. Only you can’t buy wine for £2.99 these days.
I look at the £3.99 bottles for a bit, my usual Sainsbury’s panic setting in, overwhelmed at the wealth of choice.
And then I realise that as I only have £6.52 on my card and I’m unlikely to use it for anything else for a bit, I may as well go the whole hog and get a £5.99 bottle.
But now this means that I can afford some 75% of the wines on display. I try to VLOOKUP the shelves, but the real world doesn’t function like a spreadsheet.
~I am found by the security guards trying to park cars in the shape of brackets.