HAVE YOU EVER heard of numero-phobia? It's the fear of numbers, and at www.phobialist.com, it comes before nyctophobia (fear of dark wooded areas – but, like, who hasn't got that) and after nudophobia (fear of nudity – which, funnily enough, I developed after that finance function away day when FD had a tad too much to drink at the pool party). The reason I ask is that I came across a bad case of it while plotting my latest spreadsheet triumph.

Not that it had started out as much of a triumph. I had been asked to "co-operate" with some upstart new colleague on a long-term budgeting package which FD was touting as the Next Big Thing. But I was extremely sceptical that this package would ever see the light of day, and the idea of cooperating with a "co-worker" was even worse. True jockeys are solitary figures ploughing their own furrows. Knowledge is power, so sharing it makes you weak, right?

But worst of all, this "co-worker" was actually good at the black art of spreadsheets. So while I normally get to take delight in patronising those with lesser skills, this time I'd be in danger of being taught a thing or two. And I'm a slave to catagelophobia (fear of being ridiculed). The idea was to fit the whole group budget onto one workbook. This would be no mean feat. Blaminio is a sizeable enterprise with numerous products across a host of subsidiaries in many territories. I had an idea of how the thing might work, and was looking forward to trying a few tricks. Then I discovered that my fellow jockey had already been working on the project for a few weeks. He'd planned to do the budget by territories, with a separate worksheet (or tab) for each territory or market. That was over 30 for a start. And within the worksheets, he'd composed lines for our organisation's various units, which were then subdivided into products. Despite my best efforts, I couldn't find any howlers. He had correctly used formulae and not put any numbers in them. And although I straightened out one or two small errors, there was nothing I could be too sniffy about. We couldn't argue too much, either, because we both saw the fundamental flaw with this spreadsheet: no one would ever use it.

While the numbers were fascinating — to the well-trained eye at least – we knew from experience that no-one outside finance actually opens a budget pack unless invited to personally by FD. To cope with this problem, he'd asked us to summarise the interminable tabbed pages into one succinct sheet that would hold the attention of even the non-execs.

It was an intellectual challenge – a battle to see who could come up with the neatest summary treatment. The co-worker is ataxophobic and can't handle disorder, so it ought to have been right up his street. But guess what? I won! Thanks to some late night sessions hunched over the PC, I produced a single spreadsheet which held all the salient information, showing each product line/ country/market as a net present value without any linkage or reference to the underlying data!

I could tell you how I did it – but I'd have to kill you, all 30,000-odd of you. The trick, I suppose, was to stand back from number crunching and work out what we were really trying to say. Once I'd got the communication thing licked, the grunt work was sucking the logic out of all the individual sheets – but how I did that will go with me to the grave.

My fellow jockey couldn't fault it and, of course, FD couldn't get within a mile of working out what was going on. Talk about "game over": the project team had no further purpose, so I'm back as a free agent; they have to keep me on the payroll forever to explain how the summary sheet works, in case anyone bothers to read it; and the co-worker's brain imploded with the effort of trying to out-jockey me. It's a terrible case of late-onset numerophobia, leaving him a gibbering wreck, who's no use to anyone. As a result, he's been seconded to the marketing department. I almost felt a twinge of regret.