Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Accountant Eaten by Spreadsheet!!

I tried to warn him but he wouldn't listen. I told him that I make a mean spreadsheet. He insisted that the only way he could prepare my taxes this year was for me to send him the information in a spreadsheet.

Now, he's gone forever. Taken by the meanest spreadsheet ever created. As we mourn the loss of our corporate accountant, Wendell C. Ventriliquismith, we remember the good times. We recall how his face used to light up when he talked about numbers. We remember how he used to run out of his office at 12:01am April 16th and down a gallon of Chivas Regal, bust the bottle over his head and pass out for six weeks. We're gonna miss that.

Now, for what got him. It was a thing of beauty. 134657 rows. 27842 columns. Color coded. Massive overlapping formulas and interlocking tables. Hidden data. Elaborate marcos with thought translation which enabled the user to think of data and it would instantly appear in the proper fields. I embedded an application that doubles as an electric razor and another that seizes the building environmental control system and matches the weather inside with the weather outside (it rained in Wendell's office yesterday). I even included an earth-friendly feature that turns Carbon Dioxide into bubblegum for the kids. It made time travel possible. My favorite was the formatting of the cells in row 90443. That's the one where dollar signs look like little snakes that whistle the tune of "Hungry Like the Wolf" by Duran Duran. But that's not what got our buddy Wendell. Apparently he tried to copy and paste within the spreadsheet, which is a big no-no. It briefly altered the fabric of space and time, creating a tiny tear in the universe just long enough to vacuum poor Wendell from his ergonomically-designed accounting chair and into the void forever.

While we're saddened by the parting of our wonderful bean-counter, we cannot prove that he is actually dead and he was volunteering to do my taxes so this is not considered a work-related death. Therefore we do not have to reset the "Days Without a Work-related Death" scoreboard. It will remain at 21. If we make it through today, it will be a new company record of 22 consecutive days without a work-related death. Congratulations everyone!

BTW - we now have an opening in the accounting department.

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