The Day a Spreadsheet Became My Supervisor

I once worked on a team where nobody wanted to make an actual decision, so every question was answered with, “Let’s put it in the spreadsheet.” At first this seemed harmless. Then the spreadsheet got tabs. Then color coding. Then a naming convention. Then a weekly meeting called Spreadsheet Alignment, which felt less like collaboration and more like a polite hostage situation.

One Tuesday, I asked if we could move a deadline because three separate projects were all due at the exact same time. My manager nodded thoughtfully, opened the sacred spreadsheet, and said, “According to column AQ, your workload is green.” That was surprising, because my soul was very clearly red.

Things escalated when someone added a formula that calculated “team morale” based on turnaround time. Apparently morale was 92 percent, which was incredible news to all of us, because in real life we looked like Victorian children working in a candle factory. One coworker stared at the screen and whispered, “I didn’t know morale could be measured with conditional formatting.”

The spreadsheet eventually had so many tabs that opening it sounded like my laptop was trying to leave this world. If you clicked the wrong cell, five hidden rows appeared and a senior director materialized in Slack asking for a quick sync. We were not managing work anymore. We were feeding a cube-shaped oracle.

My favorite moment came when a small typo broke one formula, which broke seven dashboards, which triggered three status meetings and a message labeled urgent. For two glorious hours, leadership had no idea what was happening because the spreadsheet could no longer tell them. Productivity dipped, but human thought briefly returned.

To this day, I’m convinced that if the spreadsheet had asked us to form a small council and offer it a ceremonial blazer, half the department would have done it. I left that job with two lessons: first, no document should have more authority than the people using it; second, if a file needs its own governance structure, it may already be your boss.