Excelling At Belittling Them  

(There is a certain report that we need to have run monthly. Unfortunately, the people who are authorized to run the report insist on giving it to us as a heavily formatted PDF, which makes it all but impossible to pull the actual information out that we need. We have repeatedly asked for just the raw data, but they insist that it is utterly impossible for them to extract just raw data from the system. Finally, after months of cajoling, I manage to get the report runners to sit down with me for a meeting to walk through the process of pulling the report. From the start, they treat the meeting as a waste of time, acting bored and talking down to me about how “complex” the system is. They end up paging back and forth through several menus before they finally find my report. They make a big production about opening it up, and then they jump up trying to export it.)

Me: *holding my hand out* “Wait!”

Report Runner: “What?”

(I reach over, pull the mouse out of his hand, and scroll it over a centimeter, moving the cursor from a button with the “PDF” symbol to a button with the “Excel” logo. I click on it, bringing up an option box, where I select the option to export raw data as an Excel document, and then do so. I turn back to look at the group, which is now dead silent.)

Me: *in the most icily polite voice I can manage* “We would like future reports to be exported as raw Excel files. Please.”

(Thus far, they have managed to actually follow that request.)