Wouldn’t you think that someone who works with numbers all day would be able to keep things on pretty much an even keel? Numbers are just there to help us understand the world, aren’t they? They don’t have evil intentions, or hidden agendas, or much of a personality at all, for that matter.

So how can a person who’s supposed to know what he’s doing get so emotional about numbers? Am I not in control? Don’t I tell them what to do, instead of the other way around? Why does it seem as if they’re out to get me?

I was on an emotional roller coaster today, hunting for a few pennies here and a couple of thousand dollars there, all in an attempt to make the various columns in the various spreadsheets that make up the Big Project balance with each other. There’s supposed to be one narrative, with a lot of ways to get to the same answer. When there are a lot of different answers, there’s no narrative. It’s like a David Lynch movie.

By the end of the day I had the four major worksheets ready to show the Boss. I could have printed them and faxed them to him tonight, or I could wait until tomorrow. I decided to sleep on the whole mess one more night, to see if something comes to me that I might have forgotten. Not that that ever happens, but yes, it does. Anyway, I didn’t want to deal with any what’s-this, what’s-that faxes coming back in the other direction. Tomorrow the roller coaster ride will be over and I’ll be ready to enter the funhouse.