Stella, the manager of a section within a large Chartered Accountancy firm, was doing her usual rounds of the open-plan office early one morning to check for any absentees, when she noticed that Fred was already hard at work behind his computer.
'My you are unusually keen this morning Fred. You are usually still chatting up the girls by the coffee machine at this time of the morning. What are you working on?' Stella added as she walked round to be by his side.
'Well Pete the supervisor gave me a huge bundle of hand-written stock-take sheets late yesterday and asked me to produce a spreadsheet which multiplied the quantities by the values and then get a total stock value. You know how much I enjoy creating spreadsheets, so that is why I've started early,' Fred replied.
'That's good,' Stella remarked as she bent over to get a better view of the computer screen.
'How far have you got, so far?' She asked.
Stella was wearing a fairly tight fitting skirt and Fred couldn't resist a quick glance at her stylish bottom as she leaned over beside him, but he managed to continue despite the distraction.
'Well I've really only just started,' he said. 'I've designed the heading and, remembering what
you have told me in the past, I've made room for the grand total to be at the top. And I've just put in two dummy items to check my formulas before I start inputting the real data. The client is a furniture manufacturer and the stock is made up of lots of different types of wood and other materials and many different sizes of screws and nuts and bolts and the like. So I've got a column to put the unit type, like square feet, or each, or metres, as well as columns for the description, the quantity and the unit value, as well, of course one for the total value of each item. Pete told me not to bother with cents in the total value column, and that is where I have run across my first problem.'
'A problem already,' Stella remarked. 'What's wrong?' she asked, although she had already spotted the error.
Fred sighed a little as he continued. 'Because Pete did not want cents in the total column, I formatted the whole column with no decimal places. However my two dummy items, which I've called 'screw number 1' and 'screw number 2', I've entered as 2 units at a value of 70 cents each. So the total value of each of the dummy items is $1.40. As I've formatted the totals column to show no decimal points the computer has valued each item at $1, the nearest round number to $1.40. That is all okay, but the total at the top of the column reads $3 instead of $2. The stupid computer cannot add one and one together.'
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