Chris 77

Watch Out!

I grew up with an intense and debilitating fear of spreadsheets. Please don’t laugh. This is not a joke! (But it may be a bit of an exaggeration) It all stems from my Father: his intense (and some might argue disturbing) love of spreadsheets started it all, turning a cog in my brain that bore deeper and deeper, until one day the mere mention of the word threatened to tip me over the edge and make me mute.

It all started one day in Dad’s office. He had spreadsheets up on his screen and was trying to show me how great they were. This was a nightmare of course! I refused to come closer to the screen, and Dad persisted trying to show me, thinking me to be having a lark. That was when the numbers on the screen organized themselves in to an evil looking face. The face stared at me and that was it: spreadsheet phobia for life! How very embarrassing–

My phobia lay dormant for years, as a child has little need to be near or deal with spreadsheets. But then, as I knew it would, it reared its head at college: the lesson was I.T. The objective? To learn how to use spreadsheets–

I left that lesson after fifteen minutes, not knowing what to do. For years it remained that way, until a friend took me to one side asked what was wrong. I told him and he laughed, but there was something odd about it: he was looking at me very strangely. That was when he confessed his fear of mizuno running shoes, saying that he never thought he would be able to tell anyone, and what a relief it was. After that day I started to try and get on with spreadsheets. It was much easier than I thought, thanks to my friend having even more a ridiculous phobia than me.