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Yikes! Guy Bragging About Excel Skills Way Too Proud About Intimate Knowledge of Keyboards

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Photo by Arvind GroverCC BY-SA 2.0

On another solitary Friday night in a GSR lit only by firelight, Maxwell Norman (W ‘19) practices his craft, blindfolded and with a hand tied behind his back. For most Penn students, Excel is nothing more than resume fodder used to distract recruiters from mediocre GPAs and non-existent extracurriculars, but for Norman, Excel means so much more, and frankly—it’s sort of weirding us out.

During our interview, he was too concerned with achieving peak muscle memory to every maintain eye contact, but it was clear that the rhythmic clattering of his keyboard was doing some weird stuff to the dude. “You hear that? They’re cherry red keyboard switches,” he giddily told UTB, as if we were the types of nerds who gave a shit about keyboard switches.

While watching him navigate spreadsheets and build pivot tables with one hand was pretty impressive in a vacuum, it was pretty obvious that Norman was way too proud of the fact that he was saving 0.7 seconds every time he remember how to click three buttons on his keyboard at the same time.

“Nothing matches the serotonin rush I feel when I get to show off all the tricks I’ve picked up over the years,” Norman purred, while literally just using Command-V to paste some numbers between columns a bunch of times, “I honestly pity the people who don’t get Excel like I do.” Norman then began gingerly caressing his keyboard with a level of care and affection that we found deeply fucking uncomfortable.

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