Satire — fictional humor, not factual reporting. Everything below is invented for fun. Names, characters and events are fictional.
A traveller named Bartholomew Quill has completed the planning stage of a half-price holiday and is now preparing to begin the planning stage of the holiday itself. The spreadsheet, which has fourteen tabs, took roughly forty hours to build. By his own calculation, that works out at about the same number of hours as the trip.
The workbook includes tabs for flights, hotels, snacks, contingency snacks and something labelled Vibes, which contains a single cell reading Relaxed? Each tab is colour coded. Green means booked, amber means pending, and a particularly stern shade of red means that Bartholomew has remembered his passport has an expiry date.
"A discount is only a discount if you have optimised it," he explained, adjusting a second monitor that he bought for the occasion. "The fifty percent saving is lovely, but I believe I can reach fifty-two with the correct formula." The formula, he admitted, is currently throwing an error and has been given the name Kevin.
His sister Cordelia, a person of calm habits, suggested that he simply book the holiday and look at the sea. Bartholomew thanked her and added a tab called Sister's Suggestions, which he has colour coded as grey and shortlisted for review next quarter.
The planning has not been without sacrifice. He has missed three dinners, one birthday and the final episode of a series he had been saving for the flight. The spreadsheet, meanwhile, has accumulated pivot tables, a macro and what appears to be a small weather chart for a beach he has never seen.
At one point a rival tab named Sunscreen Strategy threatened to outgrow the Itinerary tab. Bartholomew resolved the matter by merging them, a decision he later described as the most emotional moment of the whole process.
With the departure date now eleven days away, he has finally begun packing, a task he expects to complete in a fraction of the time it took to plan. He has also created a tab to track packing progress, which currently stands at one sock.
Asked what he looks forward to most, Bartholomew paused for a long time. "Closing the laptop," he said, then quickly added that he would of course be bringing the laptop, in case the holiday needed a quick audit while he was away.
Inspiration (a separate, real report — nothing above is factual): read the real story. This satire is original, AI-assisted and editor-reviewed by The Global News Feed.
