Spreadsheet People (Fiction)

Spreadsheet People is the winner of Esoterica's inaugural Short Story Contest.

By Emily Zasada

It was a Monday afternoon, and the spreadsheet people were at it again.

Sara had the quarterly budget open, it had been open on Friday, and now it was open again, damnit; there was no escape. Also, if it wasn’t this quarterly budget, it would be another one from another quarter; they were all the same, pretty much. She was copying and pasting her formulas from one cell to the next, thinking (as she usually did) was a slippery process this was, how easy to have one cell reference wrong somewhere without knowing it and then have that wrong reference transposed to multiple cells, all without knowing it, because there’s something so deceptively smooth about the copy and paste process with the way it just leaves a fresh number in a cell calculated by the underlying formula and, honestly, who wants to go back through and double-check everything. Who doesn’t just want to call it a day, believing that those numbers are correct?