Alain M. Lafon

This week I have written my first Excel sheet ever – and I think I don’t lie when I say “ever ever”. As a person dedicated to computers, there’s always a guy who will come up to me and ask some question concerning Office – and my answer has throughout been: “I’m into computer science, I don’t do Office.”

Well, now that my career has changed and I’m not working for Sun anymore(where I already had to change my opinion a little since I had to publicise OpenOffice), but am into programming business applications – dealing with Office(MS Office in particular*choke*) has become day-to-day action.

Working only 70%, I am the only employee who is allowed to write down hours. My choice was to use a fancy Web2.0 tool which most certainly would make my life more productive while at the same time easier, but ultimately I chose to use Excel for practice. And even though I could fall back upon my large repertoire of Excel functions(i.e. SUM and ROUND), I also had to get help finding a way on how to count lines that are already used.

Luckily my improvisation skills were great enough to do the perfect job: I can write down my hours and my breaks and it automagically calculates how many days I have left in overtime. I even agreed with my inner conscience that Microsoft Office was lame – so I chose to not only use a proprietary application, but also a personality(and therefore life-)threatening tool called Google-Docs for the sake of ubiquitous information. No One can hold me responsible for not being able to remember my current overtime whilst I have the need to know it each and every second of my life. Well, I could have used OpenOffice and my FTP server, but who really wants to be a good and intelligent person in this messy world, anyway? It would have taken me like what.. minutes.. to do the same job with free tools – never mind, I’m a busy man now.

And now comes the funny part. I realized I had to improve on my work-reward-expectations that I had grown into begin a lowly student(I’m talking of things like having to work all day without ever[ever] getting a reward whatsoever) – in my first 15 days, I already worked enough to earn me over 7 free days in overtime.