Shift+Delete - "THE DEVIL IN ME"

I now dread the sound of my caption! 

Until it nearly caused not only l, but three other colleagues of mine one of the finest opportunities; it was one of my favorite go to shortcuts.

It was the eve of report submission deadline for the 2017 edition of the CharterQuest CFO Case Study competition. My team and I arduously worked towards beating the deadline and at the rate at which we worked, we were feet sure we were going to make it.

Having worked over a course of a month, solving 6 different but interrelated business cases, we culminated our brain racking exercise by spending a full day at the University of Ghana Business School. (Mind you that this was in a period of our final semester examination in the University)

Work progressed steadily with each of the four of us working separately on our respective laptops. By 17:00 GMT, we were confident that we could put together our work to produce a report worthy of making it to South Africa in October 2017.

Boy! Did we underestimate the work ahead. After several reading and proof-reading, we were sure of what we had done at about 23:00 GMT. Oh! may l draw your attention to the fact that the compilation was done on no other person’s laptop than mine.

So clumsy were the items on my desktop that I created a new folder for our finalized report which had to be submitted in both .docx and .pdf formats. In a bid to ensure that the correct report was sent, I decided to delete the working papers which were no longer needed. I selected these documents(at least in my mind, I sure did) and pressed SHIFT+DELETE.

Within a split of a second, I got an alert on my laptop which read “The action can’t be completed because the file is open in Adobe Acrobat Reader DC”. 

I had been saved by the open .pdf file!!!

I just shouted one statement, “THE DEVIL IN ME”. My team members asked in an almost unison manner what was wrong and I kept repeating the same statement. After about 30 seconds of utter confusion, I murmured that I had deleted our finalized report??. This was not funny at all at that moment.

The team leader, Jesse, just kept on mentioning my name( that’s all I could hear). In the quietness of the moment, I heard Edith laughing as if she couldn’t be bothered or it was too unfathomable for her; l honestly do not know which it was. Well for Harriet, she just stood still and watched me with her hands on her head.

I just knew I had messed up big time!

It was almost midnight at this point.

The strength of the team was to be tested grievously at this point. Like magic, every one picked their laptops again, without saying much, we started putting everything back together AGAIN. We had lost our .docx file which was editable and no matter how hard we tried, we could not convert the .pdf file back into .docx file and still have our formatting styles.

Talk of speed, accuracy, mental fortitude, and all the qualities of a great team, we worked and within a space of 2 hours, we had our report back again and even better than before. 

Clearly, we were tired as we had been on our feet for almost 24 hours non-stop.We worshipped at the foyer of UGBS and thanked God. 

We did beat our deadline, submit our report, made it to the Global top 20 teams out of 370 teams, proceeded to the Semi-final stage which had only 6 teams in South Africa, and raised the flag of Ghana and Africa high!

Ha! What a journey it was. One day, I will write about the details of happenings in South Africa.

And ohw! As at 3am, we were now leaving the University of Ghana Business School for our halls of residence. We sang, took pictures and they teased me a lot with: SHIFT+DELETE - THE DEVIL IN ME??

Moral of the story : Never ever give up! Team work matters!

Team Iris represented Ghana in the 2017 edition of the CharterQuest CFO case study competition.

Written by: Richmond Sam-Quarm,CA