I have written a short story about hell. I apologize, but it was a funny kind of story. There was quite a positive response to it so I  have decided to continue and I have written couple more drafts and I am harbouring few more ideas and maybe one day when I try really hard and dedicate my time to hitting the letters on my keyboard I might even finish writing them and give birth to a collection of short stories.

What has writing short stories to do with Excel spreadsheet? Not much. Though it would be quite interesting to write a story in excel format, numbers are words too after all. Excel in this case, has more to do with hell. According to my friend with whom I have discussed my story. His job is to prepare models, statistics, charts etc and he lives and breathes excel spreadsheets. He gave me one of the best descriptions of (his) hell ever. And I can’t use it. Not because he copyrighted the line but because it deserves its own story. And it is not a story about hell and charts. It is a story about perceptions, attitudes and observations. It is also about how fast we need to learn new things these days. I am a child of the 80s and a teen of the 90s – I remember rewinding  music tapes with a pencil. I remember when computers were a rarity – even more so as I am also a child of a post-communistic country struggling with democracy and ‘free’ economy. But I also remember how easy it was to learn and embrace new technology.

I am deeply settled in my PC ways. I love my keyboard commands, left clicks and right clicks and creating folders and subfolders on my multiple drives has become a slight obsession. I own a smartphone, a tablet, a mp3 music player and an e-reader and I don’t think I would be able to survive in a world without internet. I am tech-happy.

Then something unimaginable happened – my laptop refused to start up. I pressed the power button and the machine just sadly hissed its last breath. First, I panicked (as you do when your world is at the end) but I managed to scramble bits of common sense and got it repaired. The new graphic chip survived less than two months. I panicked again. And bought a Mac.  The ‘ctrl’ key doesn’t do what you expect of it. I couldn’t  function for good two weeks without freaking out. But I have learned new keyboard tricks (the ‘cmd’ key is pretty much the PC’s ‘ctrl’) and I’m fluently skipping from Mac to PC without any hiccups. However I am still grieving over the loss of ‘Del’ key.

‘Hell is an excel spreadsheet’. 

E in the A to Z challenge.