Excel

This is a continuation of yesterday’s Excel incident. If you haven’t read Day 1, you can read it here: Excel, Apparently: It was supposed to be just a search. I ended yesterday by deciding to leave the computer running overnight. The Excel operation had been going for more than two hours, and although Task Manager still showed signs of activity, I had no idea whether Excel was actually making progress or simply spending CPU time doing something mysterious. ...

There are some computer problems that are genuinely serious. A hard drive dies. A database becomes corrupted. A server goes down. A backup turns out not to be a backup. And then there are the problems that are, objectively, not serious at all—but somehow manage to consume an unreasonable portion of your day. Today, I experienced exactly that. It started with something so simple that I would normally never remember it. ...