Incorrect Sums

"Janet, can you take a look at this?" Said Becca, swiveling around in her fairly worn office chair. She would have been the 5th employee to have worked that desk and sat in that exact chair in the last 2 years.

An excel file opened on her computer with multiple rows wasn't adding up to the total column. She only noticed it because of the one value that wasn't a flat dollar amount. $21.79 in row 56, but the total of all columns was $538,408,00, a nice round number.

"What is it?" replied Janet. She hoped with all that she was that it was nothing worth more than a minute of her time. 4:45 on a Friday was no time to get curious.

Now behind Becca, peering over her shoulder, "what is it and more importantly, can it wait til Monday?"

"I don't know. Today's the end of the cycle and I have to submit before I clock out"

Becca, pointing to row 56, "that number doesn't look right, and it doesn't match the total amount."

Janet adjusted her glasses, pushing them closer to her eyes. Her lips made a movement. The wheel was definitely turning.

"Adjust the number, and submit it for approval."

Janet walked back to her desk, grabbed her coat, and headed towards the elevator.

"Wait, that's it?" Said Becca as she spun in her seat.

Janet pushed the button on the elevator, and pulled a cigarette from her coat. Not bothering to turn around, and slightly yelling, "That's it. See ya Monday!"

The elevator door opened, Janet stepped in, turning around as the door shut over it. That was that.

"Adjust the number, submit it, and go home" Becca said quietly. But which number should I adjust, she thought to herself? In total, the sheet contained 1184 rows all expected to add up to that total. Now 4:57pm, there was not enough time to manually calculate it!

Becca scrolled back to row 56 hurrying to make the adjustment. She would just drop the reminder, submit the sheet and try to enjoy her weekend. She got to row 56, and the value staring back at her was $21 even.

"That's not right. That can't be right" she said to herself. Becca looked around hoping to find someone she could run it by. The office was empty, all except for her.

She looked at the cell again. $21.00. Not $21.79. She hadn't touched it — hadn't even clicked into it yet. The formula bar showed a static value, no formula, no reference. Just a number, typed in by someone, at some point, and now typed in again by no one at all.

Becca's hand hovered over the mouse. She told herself it was a glitch, the kind of thing that happened when a workbook had been passed around a company for two years, opened and closed by four people before her, each one leaving behind some invisible fingerprint in the cell history nobody bothered to check. That was the story she wanted. It was Friday. She wanted to go home.

She clicked into the cell anyway.

=IF(AND(WEEKDAY(NOW())=6,HOUR(NOW())>16),21,21.79)

She read it twice. A formula that only became visible — only became true — at this exact hour, on this exact day. Someone had built this sheet to lie on Fridays after 4pm, and to tell the truth every other time anyone might think to check it.

Becca's stomach dropped the way it does on the top of a rollercoaster, right before the part you can't take back.

She scrolled up. Row 55 had no formula. Row 57, no formula. Just row 56. One row, one cell, built to catch exactly the kind of person who stayed late enough, and was bored enough, and cared enough to notice a number that didn't sit flat like all the others.

A test. Or a trap. She wasn't sure there was a difference anymore.

She thought about Janet's face — not surprised, not curious, already halfway to the elevator before Becca had even finished the sentence. Adjust the number, and submit it for approval. Not "what number," not "let me see." Janet already knew which cell. Janet already knew what it would say.

Becca looked at the total again. $538,408.00. Round, clean, the kind of number that closed a quarter without anyone asking a second question. If she typed in $21.79, the total would shift by seventy-nine cents, and seventy-nine cents was nothing, seventy-nine cents wouldn't raise an eyebrow anywhere in this building.

Which was, she realized, the entire point. Nobody built a formula like that to hide seventy-nine cents. You built it to see who would find it, and what they'd do once they had.

She saved a copy of the workbook to her personal drive before she touched anything else. Then she took a photo of the formula bar with her phone, because photos didn't have version history and version history, she was starting to understand, was the kind of thing that could quietly disappear over a weekend.

Only then did she type $21.79 into the cell, submit the sheet exactly as Janet had told her to, and shut down her computer.

The office was still empty. It was 5:14 on a Friday, and for the first time since she'd sat down in that worn, secondhand chair, Becca understood exactly why it kept becoming available.

She grabbed her coat. Monday, she decided, she was going to ask Janet a very different question.