It started last night, really. The Boss found some time to work on the financial reports, and he phoned about 5:30 pm, asking if it would be okay if he called me any time he had a question. I thought I knew what that meant, and I was right. Every four or five minutes for the next hour, the phone would ring and he would want me to look at something with him. “Don’t worry,” he told me about halfway through this. “It’s almost beer time.”

It continued this morning, too, and most of the afternoon. What-if-we-did-this and what-if-we-did-that, over and over until my eyes watered. He doesn’t understand how the spreadsheets work, even though he invented them. When he did them, it was all by hand in a big ledger book, so if he wanted to change something he had to recalculate all the rows and columns.

As for me, I didn’t know there even were spreadsheets before Lotus 1-2-3. I put the Boss’s formulas into a Lotus worksheet about twenty years ago, transferred them to Excel (about 19 years ago), and I’ve never really looked back. I don’t worry about how they work, because the calculations are built in and automatic. I just plug in the raw data and send them to him, so that he can pick them apart.

It kind of fried me when he called early this morning and asked if I could check my calculations on one item. It was all I could do not to laugh and cry at the same time. I got loud when I informed him that if something was wrong, it wasn’t the calculations. And I was right. He was looking at a result that was the product of two other numbers. He just didn’t know what other numbers they were supposed to be, so I happily informed him, and went back to bed.

It wasn’t to be, though, and I pretty much gave up on getting anything done today. I spent most of it waiting for the next phone call, until he finally said, “I think we’re done.” He told me he was satisfied with the last of umpteen revisions, and he was sending everything to the accountant. I breathed a sigh of relief and went on to the other things I had scheduled for today. It’s been awhile since I’ve had time to do my real daily work. It was only today, for example, on the last day of February, that I got around to reconciling the January bank statement.

So I guess I tried to get too much done in the few hours I had left after the Boss’s onslaught, because I had a relapse. Late this afternoon I could feel my neck and shoulder tightening up. I swore after last week that I wouldn’t let this happen again, but it’s hard to remember to take breaks when I get on a roll. It’s foolish, though, to jeopardize tomorrow by trying to get a tiny bit more done today. I’d like to say I’ve learned my lesson, but it seems I keep having to relearn it.