My colleague has a
calculator on his desk.
It’s got 30 odd buttons and does things like add, subtract, divide, multiply and it even has a percentage button!
So that he can always reclaim it from a colleague’s desk, he’s also put a
Dymo label on it with his
name so that no one steals it.
Sometimes when he’s working out a sum, and gets the answer he’s after he smiles, and then hits the big ‘C’ button wiping the answer off the face of the earth, safe in the knowledge that he’s got the right figure.
But then... that nagging doubt stirs up, and he’s not sure if he hit the divide button or subtract button, which could have changed everything! So he readies the calculator for a second attempt and cautiously taps in the sum again.
With great relief, the number staring up at him from that little two tone screen is the same as the one he saw not five minutes earlier.
There isn’t a calculator on my desk.
Instead I have a mouse and a
keyboard which links me to my desktop computer, upon which I have a widely used programme called Excel.
Aside from drawing pretty graphs and creating endless lists of data to bore people with, Excel also performs those simple everyday tasks of addition, subtraction, division, multiplication and percentages... much like my colleague's calculator.
And best of all, you can do lots of these little sums in different cells in order to retain the answers and review the calculation just performed.
When I mention this to my colleagues they laugh; I must be missing the point.
Is the calculator simply their office security blanket? Is there something intrinsically reassuring about getting your answer from a tiny little screen that you can make fade with a finger over the solar panel? Are small computers more trustworthy than big computers?
Who knows? Maybe I should ask them but I don’t want to interrupt their work - they may hit the wrong key and have to start all over again...
