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It Takes Almost 10 Hours to Manually Reach the Bottom of an Excel Sheet

Oklahoma man holds down the arrow button on his keyboard for hours for the greater good. Or something.

While many of us spent New Year's weekend grumbling about returning to a regular work schedule, Hunter Hobbs of Norman, Oklahoma was busy increasing the collective knowledge of the human race. Thanks to Hocbbs' herculean patience and presumably colossal bladder, we now know that it takes nine hours, 36 minutes, and 10 seconds to reach the bottom of an Excel spreadsheet by continuously holding down the arrow key. We never said it was useful knowledge.

As Hobbs himself said in the description for a YouTube video, it's the "Dumbest challenge ever that someone had to do." You can kinda sorta fact-check his work with the video, which mercifully condenses the event down to a time-lapse lasting a little over two-and-a-half minutes, slowing only for goofball moments such as when the string on his paddle ball breaks. Otherwise it's just Hobbs and a lonely bottle of 5-Hour Energy. Hobbs calls his feat the "Excel Challenge," which entails little more than seeing how long it takes to reach an Excel spreadsheet's 1,048,576th row. Hobbs already seemed to know that Excel spreadsheets had a finite number of rows ahead of time, and the exact number pops up in a number of tutorials and forums easily discoverable with Google. A quick search also reveals that all version of Excel after 2007 support 16,384 columns, which should be a far more manageable Excel Challenge for anyone who's particularly bored.

"I'm tired, I'm hungry, and my hands really hurt, which is pretty sad," he says upon reaching the end. "That was the Excel Challenge. Don't do it."