I'm a computer! I'm a computery guy! And last Thursday evening, while I was too busy writing about that documentary which I've all but forgotten by now, I was taking part in the first battle of the Excel Esports Season!
It's a series of monthly Excel spreadsheet modelling challenges - remember the world cup last year in which I put in a poor-to-moderate showing? Well, this time I was very much the same, but with glimmers of hope.
See, it was a tight 30-minute challenge, and in that time I worked through the first two of the five tasks, and the first two of the three bonus questions, and I was less than a minute away from finishing the third task when my time ran out. I thought that was halfway decent if unexceptional, but it seems that only one of the competitors around the globe got a really good score - all of the others were roughly around the level that I achieved.
Or WOULD have achieved, if I hadn't misread the bonus questions and thought they said "including the examples" when in fact they said "excluding the examples". If I'd done that properly (which wouldn't have taken any more time at all), I would have got a score that put me right up there with the leaders of the chasing pack behind that one runaway star!
This, I think, gives me hope for turning the whole Excel Esports thing into a thing I'm actually good at. I mean, it turned out that I'd made a fundamental mistake in my calculations for the third task, so it would actually have taken me a lot more than one extra minute to sort it out, but apart from that my fundamental stupidity in not double-checking that I'd read the question right gives me hope that with a bit more practice, and some more effective time management, I could eventually aspire to become the world champion in this field!
Next battle is February 16th - let's see how it goes!
You know it's easy to be a clever smart boy like me, if you could do it all digitallyyyyyyyyyyyy...
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