Whose Faulty Vision

Happy E-Mail

So a few weeks back, I was working on a presentation. A co-worker had done a first pass at the slides, but they were pretty bad, so I was going through and doing a pretty major re-write to make them into a presentation that wouldn’t put people to sleep. As I was going through, changing slide titles to something meaningful, making sure all of the statistics were in context, adding interesting implications and so on, I realized that the changes I was making were following a way of designing presentations that a former boss here at the agency had beaten into my skull. She and I had worked on a few decks together, and she was always wanting to re-write my slides in exactly the way that I was now re-writing the other guy’s slides. And of course, in her case and in mine, it was a massive improvement that would make the decks much more interesting.

So I wrote her an e-mail, thanking her for enforcing that discipline in my decks, and saying how much better the deck I was working on had become as a result.

Well, she was really touched. She’s mentioned that e-mail to me on multiple occasions since then, and apparently even sent a copy to her former mentor, to show how the mentoring has moved down the line. It clearly really made her day.

So yeah, happy thing for both of us.