Not to go all technical on you, but I screwed up royally today.

It could have been a disaster, and I could have lost not only this year’s Big Project, but part of last year’s as well. And as much as I’d like to blame myself, it was really just that one mistimed phone call that made me lose my place, and when I went back to my spreadsheet I started entering all the wrong data in all the wrong spaces.

Ouf!

Luckily (for once), I hadn’t saved any of the bad work, so I could go back to a previous version of the spreadsheet. Unluckily (and foolishly), I hadn’t saved anything at all for about an hour, so I had to go back and reconstruct everything I’d done in that hour. Somehow, probably according to some natural law, it took more like two hours.

And it all worked out for the better, because I found some errors that I think I made in the lost version of the spreadsheet, and by the time I’d corrected those (by doing the whole thing over), I’d found a neater, more efficient, and (most importantly) more elegant way of doing what I was trying to do. Because if you can’t see the artistry in it, it’s not worth doing (except for the money, and there’s not enough of that in it to matter).

This’ll work out great the next time I have to do the Big Project. It’ll work out great, that is, if I remember what I did right (and what I did wrong) this time. I’m not counting on that, though.

I’m at that dangerous point where I’m almost ready to turn over the Big Project to the Boss and the accountant, and let them start peppering me with questions and pleading for revisions. I’m not all that eager to take this next step, not because I don’t want the questions and revisions (although I don’t), but because I’m not yet fully comfortable with the way all the numbers fit together. I told them I’d need another week, so giving it to them today would unrealistically raise expectations. I don’t need that kind of heartache.