NP: Tool, Lateralus

Okay, I've been a little quiet on the main front lately, mostly because I've been consumed with the ramifications of making what might be a fairly significant mistake at work. It's amazing how much havoc one bad Excel cell reference can wreak.

What's funny -- at least if this winds up being minor and inconsequential -- is how I added another layer of processing on top of the error, largely because the output from that error was, duh, wrong. But since I was so sure it wasn't wrong, I just thought it was giving me something more intermediate as an output, so I operated on top of that. The net result may be that by treating the symptoms instead of the root cause, I got reasonably close to the same result, and fixing the problem will yield very similar results. After figuring out why simply correcting the one erroneous step gave me the results it did, I'm cautiously optimistic.

This reminds me of my old math quizzes with my dearly departed high school math teacher, one Mr. Jeff Spring. We'd always bet a Snickers bar that I'd get everything right, and then I'd make one dumb mistake that was so, well, trivial, that I wasn't ever able to see it when I'd review my work. It would invariably be something I knew well enough that I would automatically assume I did it right when I was looking over it.

And that's what happened here. It looked, on the surface, like I was getting what I expected, so I saw no reason to assume otherwise.

I've been saying over and over that this office reminds me of high school in a lot of ways. I had no idea I would take that to heart.