Excel at Assimilation

Guys, I'm trapped in an Excel spreadsheet. THIS IS NOT A JOKE!

Feb 21, 2025

It was 4 o’clock, I think. I was at work, hustling away at my bullshit marketing job, popping another nicotine pouch when my vision swirled (it happens) and I woke up drowning in a sea of cells and cells within cells that all whispered: You belong to us now. (This usually does not happen.)

Tens of thousands of little rectangles, gray on white, splayed out like rotting fish scales beneath a dying sun. I moved forward, curved and broken. Each time I tried to right myself, the grid bent and warped, mocking me. My eyes ached—assuming I still had eyes—burning from the glow of nothingness.

I don’t know how I move. I don’t know how I sense. No ceiling. No floor. Just endless rows, columns, the skin of the world peeled back to pure data. Or so I thought.

Then I saw him.

He emerged from the distant blur of cells, unbelievably tall, shaped like a man but shimmering with pivot tables and violent error messages. The Manager—I don’t know how I named him; it just throbbed in my mind. A living monstrosity of corporate analytics, glitching in and out of existence. Where his heart should be, a spinning chart, bar upon bar stacked with meaningless metrics.

When he saw me (did he have eyes?), I felt his stare pierce me like nails hammered into my skull.

“You’re out of place,” he hissed, a chorus of formula errors rattling behind the words. “Your row is empty. We must fill it.”

And I felt the existential violence of an office cubicle made carnivorous.

I screamed. Maybe. Or maybe I just silently convulsed, these 2D limb-approximations flailing. The Manager’s pivot chart heart pumped out a thick, digital sludge that stained the whiteness around him black.

And behind him—his legion—columns, rows, summations of soulless data, marching in formation, all connected by references: (='Manager'!A1), (='Manager'!A2), each referencing the same malignant king cell. Dependent and useless.

I ran, or floated, or whatever it is you do in a plane of intangible rectangles. My “foot” caught on a thick border line, nearly severing me in half. I gasped and watched error messages cascade across my body.

But I kept going. Why not?

Now: The entire spreadsheet howls. The grid lines quake with primal rage, each cell flickering from white to green to raw static. The Manager laughs (or bleeds? the noise is thick, wet, groaning). He’s some cataclysmic father figure made out of half-baked synergy reports and illusions. Should I love him?

This is your new reality: a man thrown to the beasts. And those beasts are formulas, pivot references, macros, unstoppable expansions of columns that spool out into infinity. Layers upon layers of abstraction, nothing to do with reality yet reality all the same.

“Stop your ridiculous wandering,” the Manager’s voice boomed, echoing in the formula bar, “Let us define you. You must be quantifiable.”

Define me—I’m just another cell to be labeled with a data type.

I shift sideways, my torso flickering, glitching. I see a cluster of half-merged cells up ahead, shining with that old pastel Windows nostalgia. A possible refuge. They look like a relic from simpler software. Maybe some vestige of hope. Childhood.

But the Manager steps closer, each movement accompanied by the groan of error messages. He points an elongated limb at me, and it rearranges itself into a column chart. Then, with a roar, he thrusts a bar from that chart straight at my midsection.

It hits like the heartbreak of modern life.

I double over, crashing into the cells. Cells within cells. My body tears into a swirl of digits, and for a moment, I sense I might vanish entirely. The grid flickers from A to XFD, a violent gasp of possibility.

Then I lurch up, incomplete but still there, still me. Me?

I scramble through the flickering labyrinth. Columns shift unpredictably, scraping at me like predator talons. My blurry skin is covered in references now: $A$4, $A$4, $A$4 repeated a hundred times, a million times. The spreadsheet defining me as a constant. Or attempting, at least.

I tear the references off like leeches, flinging them into the void. They dissolve into stuttering #N/A errors. Good.

The Manager’s footsteps thunder behind me. A wordless threat of assimilation. ASSIMILATION ASSIMILATION ASSIMILATION ALL MUST BE THE SAME. If he catches me, I’ll be pinned to a pivot table, reduced to a tiny footnote in a monthly report.

No. Not again.

I push forward, stumbling onto that cluster of old pastel cells. They’re shimmering with a memory of freedom—an interface from the late 90s, maybe, a time when technology felt like a friend. They’re small, though, and the way they flicker suggests they might not hold me for long.

I drape myself over them, face pressed to the gentle hue, letting their cool glow calm my quivering code. My mind throbs with half-formed questions: Is there a real sky? What if I vanish within these cells? Do my colleagues even notice I’m gone? My readers, will they ever realize?

A thousand anxieties swirl, all overshadowed by the Manager’s approach.

“We must quantify,” he repeats, a voice like metal scraping on bone, “We must measure.”

That is his creed. The universe vibrates to his rhythm, the anthem of bullshit. Summarize. Analyze. Produce for production’s sake. Metrics smother what’s left of souls.

And I realize the real face of the apocalypse: not fire, not plague, just a bland tyranny of data.

He lunges. A pivot arm snakes around the pastel cluster, tries to yank me away. The cells fight back in a quiet shimmer, releasing a gentle beep, a faint echo of an old Windows error sound. That beep makes me feel—what is it? Melancholy. Longing. Even the illusions here are bittersweet.

His pivot arm thrashes. The beep intensifies. My head’s spinning. In the reflection of the Manager’s bar chart chest, I see flickers of an outside world: my deserted desk, my half-finished coffee, a coworker poking my computer, saying, “Where the hell is Antonio?”

It’s not enough. They don’t see me.

A violent spasm tears across my vision. The pastel cluster cracks. Color bleeds out of space. The beep becomes a flat-lining tone. And I see the Manager, triumphant, bearing down on me with a swirling series of macros that promise a fate worse than deletion: assimilation into the monthly pivot summary.

I want to fight back. I want to break the system. But I’m just a glitch, a fragment. Useless.

An idea.

If the Manager is shaped from references, if he thrives on everything being neatly defined, maybe I can scramble him.

In a surge of desperation, I pull a broken line of code from the pastel cluster—a piece of obsolete formula. My intangible hands clamp onto it, an old partial script reading: =IF($Z$9999=DEATH, “NULL”, “DETACH”).

I jam it into a random cell. The entire spreadsheet crackles in an electric roar.

The Manager howls, bar charts thrashing. The pivot fortress behind him flickers. Cells melt in chain reactions of #REF! #VALUE! #DIV/0!. The entire grid collapses, violent ribbons of data unraveling like DNA exposed to cosmic rays.

It’s vile. It’s mesmerizing.

“You can’t escape your row,” the Manager shrieks, voice fractured by errors. “You will be measured.”

But the meltdown intensifies, crashing columns into chaos. He stumbles, tries to hold the sheet together. Rows vanish. The fortress collapses. A savage static tears through. Cells scream like a thousand locusts.

I run.

Green emptiness yawns ahead, half-formed formulas merging and vibrating. The meltdown might free me. It might destroy me. Hard to say. But it’s the best chance I have—ride the wave of error to somewhere else.

I throw myself into the swirling fray, bits of data slashing at my face. Waves in my skull, a cosmic migraine of fractal error codes. Flickering between existence and null, null, null.

I glimpse the Manager, half devoured, pivot chart heart spitting out nonsense data. He glares at me, eyes burning with the infinite rage of an entity that believes in total control.

“I cannot die,” he rasps. “Wherever you go… I quantify.”

Then he disintegrates into a crumpled stack of columns.

I can’t resist a hysterical laugh. Mutual destruction can be liberation. The swirl hits me, and I dissolve in a flash of pastel color, numb relief, and old-school error beeps that sound like an ancient lullaby.

And just like that, the spreadsheet dies.

Gone.

Gone, the illusions.

I’m floating—somewhere, nowhere, in between. Maybe outside the program, or in some sub-sheet beyond reason. And in the darkness, a single cell flickers, reading:

=EXIST( ) ?

I have no clue how to answer.

But I’m still here, aren’t I?

Antonio

Beneath the Pavement

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