I didn’t know today would be the day

Some days, you wake up, and you know something world-shattering is going to happen that day. Maybe it’s on the calendar, or maybe it’s just a feeling, but that’s not how today, February 5th, 2016, started off for me. I was lazier than usual, snoozing instead of just submitting to the alarm, skipping breakfast, leaving five minutes later than usual. I thought about my colleague who had just gotten engaged and was happy for her; I hoped that my outfit was appropriate for a funeral (another colleague’s parent’s funeral is today); for the thousandth time, I mentally wrote the script for telling my father that I actually cannot afford to pay his property taxes anymore and he really needs to sell his house ASAP, I mean, real circle of life stuff. I did get to work a couple minutes earlier than my closest work neighbor, so I guess that could have been a type of foreshadowing (?)

Here’s what went down: I got the return files back from a phone vendor; my organization had done some paid calls earlier in the week. One file comes back with all the information and a disposition number indicating wrong number, said yes, said no, speaks other language, etc. Another file shows totals for those dispositions, by both number and description. I usually use paste special/transpose to put the disposition number and description in columns and then do a vlookup (in excel bc these files are not gigantic). But today (why??) was not the day that I did the thing I usually do.

Well, that’s not totally true — I had my regular backup breakfast, I was obnoxious enough in the morning meeting to get a laugh but not so obnoxious as to get fired. I had the same tea, I had the same vitamin, I chatted with the same people. OK well I don’t freaking know!

Back to the files — I thought, “I think this is what hlookup is for.” I converted the numbers that were in text back to numbers, started the hlookup formula, went to the other file and saw I shouldn’t have converted the first set to numbers bc the numbers over here were stored as text, finished the fromula, did not forget to use F4 to put in the $s to anchor (?) the cells (idk, to make sure the range is the same when you copy and paste — whatever that’s called), got an #N/A result, converted the second set of numbers from text to numbers, and there it was — the results of my first hlookup, exactly what I wanted them to be.

What does this mean? Are there other obscure excel formulas that are going to be a staple for me now? What other things of which I was vaguely and dismissively aware will I now do? Will they be part of my daily routine? Will I do hot yoga or do triathlons (save your knees — don’t do it)? Go to grad school for public policy? There was a time in my life where I as trying to do a new thing every day on purpose, but I didn’t think this was the direction my life would take.