Error! Your Function Is Circular

Spreadsheets. I once overheard three guys bragging about their Excel prowess. I wondered then if maybe I had made a mistake. I’ve been thinking now for twenty-four months that I made the worst decision of my life, but now I wonder if thinking that way was the actual mistake. If I despise my role as Machiavelli’s agent in the Sun Tzu war of not making war on behalf of the United S of A, imagine—just imagine!—trying to compete in a workforce against guys who can plausibly brag about the stylings of their formatted cells.

The meeting yesterday with the Cost Analysis Division was a horror show of boredom, un-leadership, and applied apathy. Let me back up just a bit. My new assignment is to work with a tiny agency under the umbrella of the Department of the Interior. I’m not exactly sure what the agency’s mission is. Something about methane, forest fires, oil dispersants, and assisting low-income beet growers.

Anyway, The good part about this job was that I sat at a desk all day while the testing algorithm ran in the background. Meanwhile, I surf the e-waves all day.

The bad part about this job is the same for all my jobs. I come in, unannounced. Everyone hears that I’m joining their agency on a special assignment from someone higher up. Instantly, everyone hates me. They probe my qualifications. No, I did not go to MIT, Harvard, LSE, or Stanford. No, I’m not a son or nephew of Orrin Hatch or John Kerry. I leave it at that.

But, when there’s a special problem no one wants to solve, they dump it on me. So, I’m evaluating our miscellaneous receipts report for the past fourteen months. Someone somewhere in the abyss of management believes a check was deposited into the agency account, but was somehow attributed to the wrong accounting code. Good stuff. This dark lord of underachieving wants a final report, showing totals, monthly breakdowns, and percent change from month to month. The agency receives checks in basically a random fashion. So this is totally pointless. But he wants it by close of business.

When I got to the meeting, I was having a hard time letting go of the encounter with Mister Nondescript. My nerves don’t normally creep up on me like this, but I just kept expecting to see either of his two cohorts bursting through the door of the conference room and gunning me down with an uzi.

When I finally realized someone asked me a question in the meeting, there had been at least a two second pause where all eight people in the meeting were staring at me. I had no idea what the question was.

“I’m a big picture thinker. I’m sorry for the needless digression, but can you explain the broader importance?”

My b.s. made the dark lord of underachieving’s eyes glitter. I opened up a chance for him to expound on the importance of the agency to the government as a whole. Taxpayers everywhere should be grateful. I understood almost nothing of what he said. By the time he was done, the vice dark lord of underachieving was ready to move on to some other matter.

I decided right then that my mission was complete. There are no foreign agents infiltrating this agency. My boss at the Lake (the quaint name for the unnamed domestic spying agency that managed to clutch my soul to its malevolent waxed breast) thought I might learn who was behind the Gulf oil spill. No such luck.

So today I’m working on the spreadsheet. I was going to go get falafel again for lunch, but I’m so completely despondent over having to produce this report. I think I’ll just get a bag of chips from the vending machine.