Re: spreadsheets!
I was taught by an accountant (my ex-wife), that if you add up anything in Excel, make sure you put in another addition, using a different method to check that the first is correct - only if the two complement each other can you have surety over the answer and even then you would do a "reasonable check" in your brain to make sure it had the right number of digits.
This all came home to roost (not with Excel) when a colleague of mine at a large bank got fired because he failed to notice that when he got a message from the backup software saying "Backup complete", the amount of data it had actually backed up was miniscule and when the corporate email server took a dive and a corruption, there were no valid backups to recover from. All due to lack of admin permissions on the target server.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
