The worst part about it is that throughout the entire process, there's no way you can tell whether or not you're doing it correctly, and the ultimate way to check all comes down to crunching in all those endless lists of numbers into a calculator.
Your breathing gets shorter, heartbeat starts to quicken its pace, as your eyes frantically switch back and forth between the paper, the number pad, and the screen of your calculator.
You press the equals sign on the calculator.
You write down a value. Then the process starts again, but with another list of values.
You press the equals sign on the calculator.
I'll be frank- the second time I press the equals sign button on the calculator always feels like one of those ultimatum moments.
To balance or not to balance?
When the result flashes onto the calculator screen and I realise it doesn't balance, the feeling is akin to you accidentally spilling ink all over your work-- that you've just thought you finished. If the accounts don't balance, it doesn't matter that you've just spent 30 mins reading over the transactions, writing out adjustments, ledgers, trial balances, whatever. You've done something wrong, and you're going to have to shift through all the work you've done with a fine-toothed comb just to find maybe one single error that'll change everything and force you to alter all data. So you may as well just start the whole question again, and hope that this time, it balances.
When the result flashes onto the calculator screen and I realise that it balances, I experience a small hallelujah moment. I never thought I would've felt so revitalised from seeing accounts balanced, but I did.