When the kids get older, the stories are still cute, but they change.

Last weekend, I found myself working all day Saturday. Granted, I was working at home, working remotely, and so enjoyed the perks of wearing my footie pajamas and having Elmer The Basset Hound sitting next to me on the couch in my bedroom, but still: there I was, working.

One particularly horrifying stretch involved close work with our company’s accounting group, who just wanted to close March once and for all and go home. And due to a perfect storm of program changes and a lack of programming support, it fell to me to figure out some answers for the beleaguered bean counters.

And so it came to pass that they were waiting for me to produce a number, and for me to produce the number I had to finish a spreadsheet, and to finish the spreadsheet I had to get a vlookup equation to work. And for some horrible, unexplained reason I couldn’t get this simple, easy function to, well, FUNCTION.

(It should be noted that, unlike me, the accounting group was most certainly NOT at home working on their respective couches with their respective basset hounds peering at their computers. No, they were chained to their desks in the cube farm; chained, I tell you, by my ineptitude.)

If there hadn’t been a crew of coworkers of whom I’m genuinely fond waiting on me, I would have thrown the computer against the wall shut the computer down and be done with it for a while. But I couldn’t. And because they’re accountants, they frowned on my solution, which was to simply guess. This, my friends, is the Analyst’s Ninth Circle of Hell.

At one point I stalked out of my bedroom, screaming fretting all the while.  As I poured myself yet another cup of coffee, my thirteen-year-old son inquired why I was threatening to pound my computer into its component atoms.  I explained, sort of at the top of my lungs, and retreated back to my cave where we finally managed to wrest a workable number from the jaws of Excel.

The accountants went home, no doubt muttering my name with the same affection reserved for Osama Bin Laden. I shut down my computer and curled into the fetal position.

Monday morning dawned, and, back at the office, I opened up my computer and checked my email, only to find this:

Saturday afternoon, after I retreated back to my lair with that cup of coffee to finish my work, Cole had considered the problem and turned to the house computer to see if he could help. He Googled “vlookup,” found some links, and emailed them to me, hoping that I might find them useful and thus quit crying in frustration.

I have no words, other than a heartfelt “thank you” to such a considerate young man.

© E. Stocking Evans