Al-jih-bruh. It sounded like an ancient dialect, a rite of passage into a secret brotherhood. As a kid, I saw how algebra beat up on my older friends and, naturally, I wanted a taste of the anguish. I remember surveying the room the first day of class. All the big-heads were there. Lauren Barthol, queen of the spelling bee. Towheaded Jordan Guttweiler, who adapted his knowledge of current affairs into theatrical G.I. Joe battles during recess.

I had wanted to demystify that mental terrain where letters stood for numbers since sixth grade. In algebra, numbers became a language that seemed transparent only to Ms. Weir. I was transfixed as she scrawled her vignettes of equality on the board.

Never much of a big picture thinker, I could withdraw into my math homework for hours, even forgetting to watch Alf. But some of my inquisitive classmates demanded answers, became frustrated. Some of them even made the mistake of asking why. “Why should I solve for x when there’s a kickball in my closet, just waiting to be loved?”

“You’ll use it in the business world,” Ms. Weir said dryly, shrugging her shoulders. But Ms. Weir, a middle-aged suburban math teacher, was way too apple-cheeked to convince the bridge builders, architects and analysts among us that we were working on future paychecks. The slightly more digestible answer was that we should learn the joy of problem-solving, apparently an acquired taste. I’ve never seen anyone’s face light up like Ms. Weir’s at the drop of a quadratic.

But I didn’t need any answers. I couldn’t torture myself enough over those problems, pointless as they were at face value. It’s almost as if I worked harder when there was nothing in return—a trait that not only explained my abnormal acceptance of algebra but also preordained me as a rank-and-file member of the business world.

A decade or so later, after failing as a math major and taking up econ as a more practical and manageable pursuit, I learned that x and y stand for exciting things like “prospect count” and “average income,” “call margin” and “liquidatable asset.” I spent my days sorting these x’s and y’s into spreadsheets. But the real why still didn’t matter. Every few hours I peeked out from behind my computer monitor to survey the room. Four more variations of me stared into bright boxes, speechless. Pointing. Clicking. By the force of inertia I had evolved into thinking this was normal. What could I say for myself—I dragged. I dropped. I kicked some ass?

In the years that followed, I came to know the spreadsheet intimately. Just as a soldier’s weapon is his only friend, the lonely number cruncher grows to love his spreadsheet. It is a deadly efficient way to organize, cross-reference, distribute and integrate data—essentially a database, stripped of the interface. Nothing fancy, no cascading lattice of diamonds or interlocking Escher animals, no colorful background imagery. Cells simply repeat in a grid-like pattern, the latitudes and longitudes straight and parallel. The information in each cell first represents the moving parts of a business, then the analyst functions as a financial engineer, dragging, dropping, cutting and deleting until a perfect blueprint appears. Call it reductio ad absurdum, but every element of a business—every office, every person, every insignificant purchase—figures into the bottom line.

One day a superior of mine in New York hovered over such a spreadsheet. His secretary firewalled incoming calls. The bottom row couldn’t come out right despite multiple sortings, and, given the upcoming IPO, he needed a PR miracle to dupe the shareholders. Something had to go.

Thirty floors below, out on the street and out in the world, a lot of strange things had been happening. Pundits talked manically about the tech-driven New Economy, which appeared to move only up. A new kind of company, the dot-com, had begun to emerge. The energy around the Internet, which allowed some people to exist comfortably and completely at a desk, was reaching a boiling point. We were surrounded by so much invention that we started to believe the world had changed in a fundamental way. We forgot that nature abhors a steady state and prefers a curve, that ups are naturally followed by downs. Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan would impose a neatly clinical term on this attitude, calling it “irrational exuberance.”

Despite understating the mayhem of double-crossings and whistleblowers that took the media stage when it all came apart, that term captured the frenzy. Commercial breaks ran like a seamless streaming video of dot-com propaganda. It seemed like there were 30 different sites where hypochondriac Web surfers could seek medical advice. Only the standouts were on heavy rotation: Amazon, Web MD, Orbitz. How could I, a lone surfer, provide enough ticks on the hit counters to make the advertisers happy? How could I, as a consumer in the Internet’s young and professional target demographic, spend enough money online to keep the venture capitalists happy?

The answer, in X-ray vision hindsight, is that a nation full of spenders couldn’t extend the credit line far enough. Those flurrying, frenzied commercial breaks mimicked the out-of-control nature of the economy at the end of the ’90s, and they prefigured the economic implosion that came with the ’00s.

I was one of the first booted out of the New Economy, snipped from the expense sheet. I went down with a co-worker, and that made it less personal. Hundreds of thousands would follow us in the coming months, and that just made it bleak.

Together my co-worker and I visited the unemployment office, where I was surprised by our surroundings—the demographics were thick in there. It was like any public meeting place where everyone is corralled together across their differences: city buses, the DMV, the airport. For some reason, I had naively imagined a room smelling of alcohol, people missing entire rows of teeth.

No one chose to be there, shuffling around on the scuffed tile, waiting on cramped plastic bucket seats, offended by a neighbor’s intrusive thigh or elbow. A solvent fear of the unknown ate away at the unspoken relief I felt in the wake of my release from corporate servitude. I was hoping Uncle Sam’s checks would be big enough to make ends meet. A prim but distracted representative informed me that not just my income, but my freedom, would be qualified: “You will be expected to apply for four jobs every week. You must retain documentation and record your submissions on the ledger. You can be audited at any time.”

I signed for contract work that day. My job became finding a job. Given six months and a single, clearly defined objective, this looked like paid vacation to me.

How wrong I was. My days drained past with me scrolling over positions that were all the same, variations on a desk jockey theme. Each time I clicked Send, my resume disappeared into a vacuum, never to be heard from again. The few companies that were hiring wanted go-getters who couldn’t wait to get back into an office. On paper, I looked less than satisfied with the workplace; my employment history was checkered at best. Meanwhile, my comrades were getting laid off by the thousands: 10,000 at Andersen, 5,000 at United. The headlines read like casualties.

A few months passed without so much as an email rejection notice, and I started to panic at the prospect of failing—Generation-Y style. I became convinced I would go broke and face a forced migration back to my mother’s house. Consequently, my life would end. Just a few weeks before my benefits ran out, I landed a job. It seemed promising at first, but I was now a member of the “post-Sept. 11” economy and, like many of my peers, eventually found myself back in line at the unemployment office for a second pass through this mental holding pattern.

Now that I’m employed again, I can only hope that if I hang in the ropes long enough—like a boxer who absorbs his opponent’s blows—the economy will get too tired to throw another sucker punch. I’m sure this is not how things work but, until I develop a better strategy, I am still a slave to the spreadsheet, like the one that hovers over me, charting me as a small fluctuation in a single cell labeled something like “human capital.” I click and drag, sort and re-sort the vehicle of my fate.

The Harvard economist Paul Krugman opens one of his popular essays with an apology. “The essential cruelty of capitalism,” he says, “is that it treats labor as an object.”

Like a shock-and-awe campaign, the many things dropped on our desks scare us into productivity. Orders come down from people we have not met, have never spoken to and never e-mailed. In amazing feats of multitasking, we regularly perform six simultaneous tasks at a tachycardia-like pace. “Let’s see, if I can make these prospect calls while labeling the new hanging files, then maybe I can stuff these envelopes with my feet and get out of here by 6.” Something unexpected comes through the management pipeline. It’s due at 5. You give up on the dream of seeing natural light today.

So much for working hard in algebra.