In Which I Open My Mouth and Promptly Insert My Foot

Over the past year, I've finally gotten to the point where I can use Excel without crying and having a nervous breakdown. (Sort of.) I'm great at manipulating the cells, but don't ask me to do any formulas for you. I can do autosum and average, but only because it's got that shortcut button.

This afternoon I was sitting here, happily finishing up a really dismal project, when Maintenance Guy came up to me. He was plaintively holding out a green paper, and looked rather lost.

"Can I help you?" I asked.

"Um....how much do you know about Excel?"

Trying not to lie and yet still sound awesome, indespensible and smart I said, "I've gotten pretty proficient..."

He looked relieved, "Good. Then you can help me figure this out." He whipped out a green Sharpie and began making oddly shaped boxes on the green paper. "I want the difference of these two numbers, but I want it to be in a separate colum."

"No problem," I said, confidently, and began clicking around on my screen. I opened the drop-down Autosum box and, to my great horror and dismay, there was no subtract shortcut!

Quickly, so as to save as much dignity as possible, I started rambling things about how funny that was that there was no shortcut, and let me see if I can dig up the formula. Maintenance Guy was beginning to look doubtful of my intelligence.

Cheerily I said, "Oh look, here's the formula!" and began doing what I thought was correct.

Note: I have never successfully used a formula before. I am one of those people who usually has a calculator to add or subtract columns. I am not proud of this.

After offering up some feverish prayers, and having the formula come out incorrectly three times, I figured out what I was doing wrong. I fixed it and, voila!, there was the answer.

"Oh, that's not what I want. It can't be a negative number," said Maintenance Guy.

"Well, it has to be, the top number is smaller than the bottom number."

"Well that can't be, these are readings from an electrical meter...I guess I don't even know what I want. I'm going to have to come back later."

After all that potential trauma, at least I figured out how to use a formula. And you know what? It wasn't so bad after all. At least I saved face...