On Campus

Computer software? I’m not that kind of a nerd.

Microsoft Excel used to be just a button on my taskbar. Or one I sometimes accidentally clicked.

Before starting my biology lab this semester, “Microsoft Excel” was just a button on my taskbar. A button that I sometimes accidentally clicked on instead of Internet Explorer. But recently, with a lab report due the next day, it suddenly became something I had to master overnight.

The thing is, I’m not the kind of person who enjoys the learning curve involved with computer software. I don’t get some sort of satisfaction out of learning all the different hot keys. You know, those shortcuts that collectively save you 0.334 seconds over a ten-year period.

It’s hard to learn from your mistakes on a computer when you don’t, well, know what your mistakes were. Maybe computer nerds make little purring noises when a message pops up on the screen saying, “macro.shift exe function error,” or, “LSA [EXPORT RAM] has encountered a runtime error. Do you wish to debug?”

Unfortunately, “de-bug” isn’t a type of computer-savvy insect that knows how to make a graph on Excel.

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