My first real job with a salary and benefits was with a software company. I was hired to fill in for a receptionist who went on maternity leave. It was a bit of a leap, as my previous work experience had been in retail (cheese and photocopies) but I am smart and my resume was well-written, having been recently tweaked by a job-search guru-type.
I worked as receptionist for a few months and then was stationed in another part of the company working as a sales assistant. I did both jobs for the rest of the first year and then moved full-time to the sales position when the real receptionist came back.
Working in such a foreign country as software sales (and not, y’know, video games or anything; this was boring, obscure, niche software) taught me a lot. I learned about sales. I learned office politics. I learned (just) enough about the obscure software to write convincing copy. I learned how to plan a Christmas party for a staff of 50 and a truly insane company president (is there any other kind?) I learned how to fake being social just enough to go out for lunch with people but not enough that you become the go-to person for every single employee birthday cake and company party. I learned that I had strengths in areas I would never have thought to look; organization, teaching, sales and marketing, diplomacy. One skill that I didn’t trip over, though, was any sort of skill with numbers.
My history with numbers goes like this:
grade 1: having skipped half a year of kindergarten because I was so “advanced” as a reader, I find myself mired in math. I hate it on sight.
grade 7: the phrase “math is beautiful” is uttered by my favourite teacher more times than I have tears of frustration to cry over the fact that I am NOT GETTING IT.
grade 9: a cute boy is in my math class!
grade 10: my math mark, at its usual “C,” prompts my father to send me to summer school because I should really get better than a “C” in math (despite 12 years of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he continued to hold firm to this belief.)
grade 12: thank god, no more math for me!
university: after several tries, I pass Quantitative Methods of Political Analysis (AKA Statistics hiss) and eventually get my degree.
At my first performance review with the software company, my boss, the unofficial vice president, said, You’re great. But you’d be better if you could make spreadsheets. You see, she was actually an accountant. A real, live, cuckoo-for-Quicken accountant. She liked numbers. They made sense to her and sang her to sleep. I, by contrast, would give her reports verbally or written in stunning paragraphs of prose which caused her to blink and ask again, are sales up or down? I didn’t speak her language. As part of my coming-year commitments, I registered for a course in Microsoft Excel.
I grew to appreciate the efficiency of Excel. I grew to like how a few simple formulae could save a whole bunch of time. I especially liked how I only had to learn a few simple formulae to seem way smarter. Now I seemed like a person who knew math when in fact I just knew a computer program.
(A lot of people confuse the two. They think they are writers because they can format using a word processor; they think they are graphic designers because they can use Powerpoint hork, spit. I fostered no such illusions: I knew full well that learning Excel would help me stay lazy while my boss thought I was working harder.)
My next job, though, worshipped at the altar of Corel. The Excel equivalent by Corel is a program called Lotus 1-2-3 and oh my word does it suck. I know that’s like someone who wears only sneakers having the gall to criticize someone’s Jimmy Choos for esthetic reasons but using Lotus 1-2-3 is like eating soup with a fork. It’s like hugging a news anchor. It’s like an empty bag of chips in your cupboard.
Today I was walking home from getting some groceries. Trombone was in the stroller, grunting away. If I ever do this again, I thought, I am getting the infant seat. Because it’s all well and good and cost-efficient to buy a convertible carseat that will last through the child’s 4th birthday but really, the infant seat is so handy. It has a handle and the kid can sleep in it and eat in it and if it has a cold it can sleep upright. It’s only a hundred dollars or so. It’s a great tool.
But my brain didn’t stop there. I guess that’s another reason people have more than one kid, it said, because it’s such a waste to learn from your mistakes the first time and then not be able to use what you’ve learned.
Yeah yeah yeah! Sort of like me learning Excel, my brain was getting excited now, I mean, why on earth would I want to know how to use Excel in the first place? Some people are born to be accountants and some people CAN do it but prefer not to and some people can learn just enough to get by. Now I know how to use Excel and it seems a shame not to use that skill. I can see how some people would think that way about childbearing. You’ve got the skill, you’ve got the knowledge, you’ve got the crap in your storage locker already. What’s the big deal?
The big deal, retorted the other part of my brain, distinctly unexcited by this train of thought, is what if you learned how to work Baby A (Excel) and then Baby B is Lotus 1-2-3? Now you have TWO spreadsheet programs/babies taking up space in your brain/house and you don’t even like numbers/people that much!
What can I say. If I could take my brain out and put it in a glass jar for a couple of days, I would.
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