Tag Archives: spreadsheet

Get off my list…

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I’m making a list and checking it twice, because one of my fun little “other duties as assigned” is filling in as the Keeper of COVID Numbers whenever one of my distinguished colleagues is out of the office. Today was one such day.

Without giving away state secrets or anything confidential, let me just say that the number’s we’re putting up aren’t good. They’re not good on a level much higher than previous iterations of my sitting here plugging away on the spreadsheet thinking “Damn, that’s a lot of people.”

I’ve never really been a fan of people, but increasingly it’s hard to think of our species collectively as anything more than unmitigated plague carriers.

Get vaccinated. Get boosted. Wear a mask. Stay the hell away from people. 

Even if none of those things are perfectly effective, combined they go a long way towards keeping people off my list… because quite frankly trying to track this many lines on a spreadsheet is just an enormous, time-consuming pain in the ass. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Context. “Eisenhower wasn’t a great general because I’ve recently learned he was *very* anti-LGBT.” Uh. Well. He held supreme command in the 1940s. Context is king, people. Expecting a man born in 1890 to somehow embody the all the woke-ist 21st century sensibilities is, in a word, stupid. It’s like saying Charlamagne wasn’t a great commander because he refused to go vegan. 

2. Auto Save. I had a perfectly nice little post mostly written for Tuesday. I was wrapping up a final thought right before the power stuttered just enough to cause my computer to shut down. Historically the Mac auto-saves before it dies, but in this case everything just disappeared into the ether.  It’s the sort of thing generally prevented by the uninterruptible power supply… which also is apparently no longer working. So it’s a bit of a bad week for the home computer set up all around, really.

3. Numbers. Either I’m wrong or the spreadsheet is… and I’m pretty sure it’s not me. Or maybe it is. The real lesson here is that I should never be allowed to do work that involves large columns of numbers without close adult supervision. It very rarely ends well. Although I’ll make sure it at least ends “close,” so there’s that.