Glenn Huff’s Spreadsheet

Clearly, Glenn Huff was not in the ADHD family. A ninth-grade dropout, my father had to leave school at fourteen to help his dad run a grocery store. His working memory worked, and he had to exercise it daily. My father could hold a lot of numbers in his head, organize and manipulate them, and solve complex mathematical problems. He also lived on a farm and witnessed his mother counting hens and eggs and estimating yields from their crops.

Today, I met with an accountant for help with some complicated financial issues. I prepared for hours, crunching numbers with a calculator, pen, and notepad. I erased and started over so many times that the numbers looked like the scratches a hen makes in the dirt. I calculated and recalculated so I could ask intelligent questions. The meeting lasted almost two hours, after which I told the accountant that I needed a nap. The effort to follow his dancing numbers, and then extrapolate what I needed, was exhausting.

Glenn Huff could have taken the same information and produced the answers in fifteen minutes. That is no exaggeration. That humble man didn’t think his spreadsheet brain was extraordinary. He just wondered what on God’s green earth was wrong his son who struggled to reconcile a simple bank statement with fifty dollars in the account. I would never measure up to what my dad modeled as normal.

My accountant—a fellow baby boomer—highlighted some differences between the generations, before and after ours. My dad’s generation, he said, had to rely on their brains to do what computers do now. My daughter’s generation, on the other hand, grew up with software that worked like my dad’s brain. Between those generations are the trainable old dogs that must learn new tricks. Successful boomers living well with ADHD will seek help when they need it, instead of being too embarrassed to ask.

Still, if I had the choice, I would take my dad’s spreadsheet brain over spreadsheet software! It never had to be downloaded or upgraded!

One Response to Glenn Huff’s Spreadsheet

  • YES YES YES. I can’t reliably get 2 + 2 to = 4. Never able to learn my times tables. My poor dad spent hours flashing cards at me. He just kept shaking his head and asking why I didn’t know my times tables yet. I didn’t know why. So, when the opportunity came to join the grade school band I jumped at it. How is this relevant? The band met at lunch time. If I stayed in my class we had to do, guess what? EXTRA MATH! So, what would YOU have chosen! I played that flute in bands all the way through high school.
    While, I can’t do “regular math”, I am the one who, much much later in life, asked questions that stumped the teachers in theoretical and statistical math and found misprints in the text books. In fact, when I took a chemistry course in a night school premed class, I found that almost all of the women had been “bad” at math–gender stereotypes/expectations, teaching methods that didn’t work for them. But there we all were, grinning and balancing chemical equations and a bit ticked off that we had to try so hard to find our niche.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Support Group Email Reminders

To receive email reminders of our meetings, click here to contact Sara Skillen.
You only need an ADHD diagnosis to attend.

Sign Up for Blog Posts
* indicates required

Choose info you'd like to receive