The handwriting in an old ledger turns a number back into somebody’s task.

Records look impersonal until you see the hand that made them. A column of figures in somebody’s careful writing, with a correction and a smudge, stops being data and becomes an afternoon: a person at a desk, doing this because it was their job, probably tired by the end of the page. Every number anywhere was produced by somebody doing something. The typed version hides that; the handwritten one cannot.

When you next look at a set of figures, spend a moment on who compiled them and under what conditions. It will change what you trust in them, and how you speak to whoever keeps them now.