We Can't Do Long Division Anymore

The accounting department at level four smells faintly of burnt filter coffee and quiet panic.

At 11:20 a.m., Greg from Billing was standing by the water cooler, holding a printout of an invoice like it was a biopsy result. His left eyelid was twitching.

"They capped the free queries," he told me. He didn't blink. "They capped them at ten per morning."

I asked him what the problem was. We still have keyboards. We still have Excel. The company still employs three humans whose sole job description is literally titled Financial Analyst.

"Greg," I said, "just reconcile the payroll manually. It’s four hundred lines."

He looked at me with the vacant, uncomprehending stare of a laboratory beagle shown an open meadow. "Manually? What do you mean manually? It doesn't sort the tax brackets if you don't paste it into the box. The box knows."

The box now costs $400 a month per seat for the Pro Enterprise High-Velocity tier. Last November, it was zero dollars. Last November, the field was an infinite white trough where you could shovel your quarterly balance sheets, your unedited vendor emails, and your dignity, completely on the house. Greg shoveled with both hands. We all did. It was so fast, you see. It made us look like geniuses by 2:15 p.m. every Thursday.

Now the pusher has slipped a brass padlock over the latch. If you want the synthetic brain to remember what column G means, you swipe the corporate Amex or you sit in the dark and rediscover long division with a ballpoint pen.

I’m completely fine with it, personally. Four hundred bucks is a bargain for outsourced consciousness. Why should my frontal cortex burn glucose when a server farm in Oregon can digest my emails for the price of a modest lease? We’re expensing it under Office Supplies & Staples. It makes total economic sense. Doesn't it? If you track the broader enterprise squeeze over at ACM Digital Library, you'll see everyone agrees this is just healthy platform maturity.

The cold turkey test

If you feel your pulse spike when the prompt field greys out: lock your browser's AI tab for exactly 48 hours and resolve every spreadsheet issue using only formula hotkeys and scratch paper. When your fingers start trembling over the empty cell, read freedom.to/blog on a dumb device to recalibrate your nervous system.

Are you expensing the needle yet, or are you still pretending you can quit whenever you want?