The pencil lives, but the human dies by successfully outwitting a computer program with his brain and a pencil. This article could post some perplexing philosophical issues of modern life: human willpower over machines that are only made by humans in the first place. Or it could just be extremely funny:

BALTIMORE—Office laborers across the nation are mourning the passing of Wallace Peters, 42, the mythic three-column accountant at Chesapeake & Ohio Consultants who pitted himself against Microsoft’s latest version of the popular spreadsheet program Excel.

Although Peters was able to balance his sheet a full 10 seconds before the program did, the man celebrated in song and story as the “cubicle worker’s John Henry” was pronounced dead of a coronary thrombosis late Monday evening.

The late Wallace “Wally” Peters, whom colleagues are calling a 21st-century John Henry.

“He died with his pencil in his hand,” shift supervisor Thomas Kaptein said. “Wally Peters was an accounting-driven man.”

Accounting crewmen who worked alongside Peters said his legend as an accounting hero was formed by his willingness to answer to the challenge.

“He’d tell us, ‘Now, 20 rows down, the accounting’s hard as granite—it’s the hardest thing an office man can stand,’” said Huddie Ledbetter, one of Peters’ former trainees, “‘but you keep your pencil sharp, and you keep your pencil working. It’s the life of a numbers-crunchin’ man.’”

Sources say Peters, who was born to poor temp workers in eastern Virginia, would often go to offices where his mother worked and sit on her knee. According to his family, he once took up her pencil and said, “Pencil be the death of me. Oh, Mommy, this pencil be the death of me.”

Read the rest of the article at The Onion here.

Thanks for the link, Michael!