A Card Carrying Member of The Nerd Herd

In case you did not know me in high school, you should know that I am, and have recently proven again to be a member of the Nerd Herd. You may be embarrassed, or quiver in disgust of my self proclamation of being a nerd, but I urge you not to fret. The Nerd Herd was not established due to looks or popularity. They are merely an elite group of individuals who at one time walked the halls of Boiling Springs High School, had surprisingly high intellect, and of course, always had a good time despite the lack of fun things to do in their town. True, some of these individuals may freak out over the mere mention of Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, some can do ridiculous things with computers or solve math problems that would make your head spin, and others would spend an obscene amount of time drafting articles of membership to these groups we made up, or planning to the very infinitesimal detail a minor prank that would most likely go unnoticed. Despite these facts, I ask you readers not to judge these great men wrongly. For many of them are now doing your taxes, teaching your children, designing the buildings around you, healing the sick, and preaching God’s word.

From time to time, I like to prove that I am in fact worthy of such a membership. For I, am addicted to MS Excel. I have spreadsheets that monitor many aspects of my life. Not only do they keep track of all of the data, but they have preposterous formulas laden through intense models to make the data collecting faster, summarize everything, and spit out statistics that the average person would never care to know.

Soon, I am going to have the wonderful privilege of being a father. I am so excited about that privilege that I can hardly contain myself. The things I am going to be doing and the responsibilities that I am going to have are simply fantastic. Due to my nerd-osity, one of the things I am honestly excited about is the opened avenue of new spreadsheets. Do I know exactly how much we have spent so far on medical bills, baby furniture, and other preparations for the birth? Of course, but that is just a small part of it. One of the important tasks of a father during the labor process is keeping track of contractions. 1 min. contractions, 5 min. apart, lasting for more than an hour. That is the goal. That is the moment that you know the baby is going to be coming soon enough that it is time to get your wife to a hospital.

How does one keep track of this time? Just feel it out and leave when it seems like you’ve reached that goal? Use a stop watch and scribble down numbers that you won’t be able to read later? Of course not! You have to make a spreadsheet…. And it has to be easy, and awesome. That is exactly what I created… “The Awesome” when it comes to a contractions spreadsheet. This beast does it all on one page. Click the start button, click the stop button, and that’s it. It keeps track of all of the contractions and summarizes the progress in one simple place. You know at any given moment the number of contractions, total time since first, average length of and between since the start and average length of and between on a floating hour basis. It monitors these things on an exact date and time basis so later you can tell the kid exactly what moment things started and when it was time to leave for the hospital. If you don’t think it would be too hard to create such a thing, then you are off. This involves macros with loops to create a place for the next contraction, and some pretty tricky formulas. Here is an example of just one of the formulas I used:

=IF(A8="","",IF(ISERROR(VLOOKUP("here",I9:I5001,1,FALSE)),IF(B8<(SUMIF(H:H,"here",B:B)-(1/24)),"here",""),""))

And one more for fun:

=ROUND((AVERAGE(INDIRECT(M19&":"&N19))-ROUNDDOWN(AVERAGE(INDIRECT(M19&":"&N19)),0))*60,0)&" sec"

So there you have it, I am a nerd. But I am proud of it. In fact, I am so proud of it that I would gladly send anyone interested the file so you can enjoy it in all of its glorious majesty.

I can’t wait until Liz starts going into labor so I can start to utilize this tool.


…. Don’t judge me.

Thanks for reading