I am Kyle Young, and I Love Spreadsheets

I knew when I awoke that I must have died, because unlike the sterile colorless ceiling of my closet-sized apartment or the bright spreadsheet-laden screen of my computer, my eyes that morning first gazed upon the silhouette of a goddess.

Now I figured she was some kind of cosmic being for a few reasons. The radiant glow that covered her skin felt evidence enough, but she was also draped in a white ethereal dress and gazed at me with motherly affection. The room we occupied could also be described as other-worldly; we were both enshrouded in a misty haze lit by luminescent orbs and seated auspiciously at a levitating dining table set with food and wine.

She spoke to me with an illustrious and clarion tone, as if a minstrel of kings was casting her blessing upon me, her words rounded by sweetness and subtle diffidence.

“Kyle Young. It’s most unfortunate, but it would appear you’ve died.”

There we go. I was dead. See? I was right.

“Yeah,” I said, pretending to be downcast. “W-what happened my lady?”

“Shh,” the goddess spoke to me. She gestured to the orbs, which coalesced and hovered above her to form a halo, “Let the light of the goddess descend upon you, and I shall answer all your questions.”

The sheen that lit up her bodice like a festive holiday tree brightened further as she lowered her head, closed her eyes, and chanted meditatively.

“Yes, Kyle Young, Kyle Young,” she nodded to herself, “The timeless universe is granting me a glimpse into your ill-begotten fate such that I can grant you your just reward–Wait a second.”

The goddess’s eyes clenched, her head tilting side to side as if perplexed. The shimmering amongst the orbs began to fade and the goddess opened her eyes, turning her expression back onto me. Her comforting gaze transformed into a look of disgust and disappointment. Her shoulders slumped forward and she heaved a deep sigh, dropping her face onto her lazily propped up right hand.

“Right. Kyle Young,” she moaned, “I thought I had heard that name before. Yes, yes, I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Eh?” I said, “What’s going on, what’s happened?”

“Let’s get straight to the review, I guess.”

The goddess reached and produced from behind her back a small digital tablet. Her elegant golden hair tied itself into a ponytail fit for a white collar profession and a pair of thick rimmed glasses settled over the bridge of her nose. Her once glowing gown in the blink of an eye had now become a blazer and plaid charcoal skirt, and I found myself seated, not at an ambient dinner table, but inside a cramped office space surrounded by dusty binders and half-watered potted plants.

“Kyle Young,” she said, reading from the tablet, “You died as a young man. Pfft.”

The goddess snickered.

“Did you just laugh at your own joke?”

“Ahem, you died young,” the goddess emphasized, “in your mid twenties and were a man of little import. Likely no one is going to remember or miss you.”

“Uh.”

“In fact,” the goddess continued. “the only item of note on your life’s resume is that you dedicated your life to the maintenance and preservation and optimization of…spreadsheets.”

Spreadsheets. The digital ledgers of contemporary society. The abacus on steroids. Thousands upon millions of accessible rows and columns that can be filled to the brim with data, names, potpourri, formula, graphs; there was even an artist in a neighboring country who created art with spreadsheet applications because they were too thrifty to purchase their own art supplies.

Yes. Spreadsheets. Perhaps mankind’s most luxurious achievement.

“Yes, my lady. I dabble here and there in them. Is there a problem?”

“You dabble in spreadsheets,” she repeated, “Would you happen to remember how you died, Kyle? Or rather, can you simply tell me the last thing you remember?”

“I…”

I thought about it for a moment. What was my last memory? What was I doing last night?

My mind was blurry and I swam as if without goggles through watery thoughts and images. But as I concentrated, I could feel myself breaking through the surface of the meniscus and arriving at the events of last night.

I was alone and seated at my computer, a messy pile of crumpled documents to my left and several empty styrofoam coffee cups to my right. My drooping eyes, surrounded by concentric walls of placid gray, stared at the dim screen just centimeters from my face. On it was a worksheet I had prepared for months.

Twenty seven tabs, thirty six thousand, five hundred estimated rows of links, data, and calculations, a dozen graphs and written conclusions that I was to import for a keystone presentation for investors tomorrow.

“Finally,” I muttered, sitting back, “It’s all coming together. Time for a break.”

I glanced at the clock. It was a quarter past midnight, which meant that the latest update for Bland Orange Fantasy had just dropped. A message in my personal inbox rang and I found attached the latest datamined information that I would copy and paste into my custom built spreadsheet model.

I extracted the file as I always did and double clicked.

Perhaps I was too tired; weeks and weeks of overtime had dulled my senses. I didn’t pay attention to the fact that the file was a smaller size than I had anticipated. I didn’t notice that it wasn’t my usual contact who forwarded me the file, and I didn’t notice that the file was an executable.

When my computer screen began flashing erratically, when pop ups flooded my desktop, when it was already too late, only then did I realize that something was wrong. I rushed to my desktop tower and unplugged it as quickly as I could, but when I rebooted the PC, it soon became apparent that the damage had been done.

Gone was the client document that I had prepared for months. Gone was the optimized equipment module I had made for Bland Orange Fantasy. Gone was the table I used to keep track of books I read or credit cards that I was churning. Gone was my spreadsheet of immediate contacts, how much money they owed me for food, their phone numbers, and notes on their personal hygiene and eccentric mannerisms.

The shock of losing everything valuable in my life must have dealt me a severe blow, because my heart began to pound, faster and faster, before I clutched it when the pain drove me to the brink, and darkness overtook me.

As the memory of my untimely demise receded, I returned to the present and stared at the goddess before me, who returned my sullen appearance with a yawn.

She picked her nose.

“Seems like you remember,” she said, flicking a brownish speck towards my face, “You died because you lost some files.”

“You make it sound like that’s not a big deal!”

“It’s not even a deal,” the goddess snorted. She snatched the digital tablet and held it in front of my face. Familiar images were featured upon it, “Tell me. What’s this?”

“Hey! That’s my efficient fuel starship calculator for Steve Online.”

“And this?”

“This is a plugin I built to parse my damage in GG14.”

“I’m almost too scared to ask, but this?”

“This builds weather simulations based on rainfall data so I can predict player performance during baseball games.”

“Kyle,” the goddess set down the tablet, “I have to be honest with you. When a person like you dies young, we grant them some kind of karmic retribution. It’s kind of like life insurance.”

“Do you do an actuarial analysis?”

“Kyle, listen to me,” the goddess said, “Usually, we reward younger people because they have dreams, they have things they aspired to do, we don’t want people to curse the universe in the afterlife. But you had nothing Kyle but the spreadsheets!”

“That’s a lot; I had four terabytes!”

“No Kyle,” the goddess sighed, “Think of how much you depended on them to give meaning to your life. Kyle, the spreadsheets. They were crying.”

“They were?”

“Even if you had anyone you ever loved that wasn’t just a table full of data, we would reward you with something, but no, Kyle, I can’t reward someone like you.”

The goddess stood and the room began to shake.

“Kyle,” she said. “The only fitting punishment for someone so needlessly blinded by the need to optimize is to live a life of optimization, only to realize what you can never have.”

“What does that even mean?”

The room wasn’t just shaking now, it was swirling. The binders trembled and dust scattered into the air, obscuring the silhouette of the goddess as she disappeared into ether. The dust accumulated into a storm that enveloped the room, enveloped myself until I could not see or hear or smell or taste and the world as it was came to an end.