Ever been in a situation where in you think you are stuck with a nerd breathing down your throat? I have had my share of ‘nerd’ bosses for some time now and every time I think of the times I had to put my foot down on certain situations, I recollect the tough times my boss gave me. One will often run into a satiation that you think you can best handle until the boss comes around and messes up your plans. He/she will explain to you how dumb you are to think of such a foolish plan and how he/she is “right”.

I remember on incident where I had to present a report in the form of an Excel Sheet. Before I went in for the presentation, I knew that something may come up in my boss’s mind and he will surely mess up my presentation. So I decided to carry two printouts of the Excel Sheet.

I walked into my boss’s office all ready to make the presentation. To my surprise my boss had invited a couple of other senior colleagues, for reasons which later became apparent to me. He wanted to prove how smart he was… anyway…

I started off with the presentation and handed out the copies of the printout to the members present there. All was going on well and the members, other than my boss, were quite impressed with the statistical data and the analysis I had done. As I was about to close, my boss turned to me and in a sarcastic tone said, “You know what, I think your presentation could have made a much better sense if only you had represented the data in the ‘columns’ as data in the ‘rows’ and vice-versa.

I could see through his plan and I knew it was coming. I immediately fished out the second set of printouts that I had taken and surely I had replaced all the data that was in the columns with that of the rows.

Not to mention the other members were more than surprised at my preparedness. The after effect of this incident was that I was promoted and moved on to a new department, thanks to one of the members that was present during the presentation; he appreciated my work and now is helping me gain better experience.