“Remoted – Hybrid” – Day 850 (Wednesday) – prep work

This morning started rough. I was out of bed 30 minutes early and somehow managed to leave the house 10 minutes late. In the parking garage, I realized I had forgotten to grab something for breakfast. Hot on the heels of no the breakfast realization was recollection that the phone charger had also been left at home. Oops.

Pre-cake healthy stuff.

The day took a quick turn for the better with the knowledge that we were having cake in the office to celebrate a coworker’s birthday. Not too long after my healthy lunch of leftover sautéed veggies with mushroom, kalamata olives, and cheese from Tuesday's supper, it was cake time. 

Cake guilt was alleviated with the reminder that there had been no breakfast, and the idea that healthy lunch offsets cake. The cake was a delicious moist, chocolate cake with light, sweet, creamy frosting. The grocery store bakeries really put out some good cakes. I took no cake photos. I’m slipping.

The day was productive. For the second day, I was deep in preparing an Excel workbook to track media planning with formulas and rollups from individual pages to a summary sheet. It’s not the most complicated workbook I’ve ever worked on, and luckily, it’s an adaptation of an existing workbook so the tedious prep work of building the sheets was already done by someone else long ago. It’s been a while since being immersed in spreadsheets and I’ve missed it.

The title of most complicated workbook was several jobs ago when I worked in corporate treasury management. We had a monster workbook with pages for each our 43 subsidiaries and a summary sheet that calculated totals from all the subs. The worst part about that old one was getting 43 offices to understand that “Do not alter the worksheet” meant just that. Month after month, we’d receive worksheets from at least one naughty manager (usually Renzo in Italy), who chose to delete rows of the sheet because that office “didn’t need to use those rows” and when the data was transferred into the workbook, the rows didn’t align, formulas would be broken, and time would be required to figure out what bits of info went where. So frustrating.

The old workbook is filed under the personal memory folder called “things I don’t miss from that old job,” and the workbooks from subsequent years are tucked away in the “thanks to that big old monster workbook, every one since then has been easier” folder.

Quick supper.

So far, the trickiest part of the new workbook is deciphering radio jargon of 2009 that doesn’t appear in any of our current schedules. That’s where the “hide column” feature has come in handy. It might eventually lead to the “delete column” command, but I don’t want to be hasty or premature.

After all the cake at work, supper was light. It was a repeat of the Scala bread, tomato, basil, provolone, and mayo of the other night. Quick, tasty, and all ingredients on hand. The weekend’s preparatory grocery shopping sure makes weekday life easier.