One of us is crazy and I don't think it's me...

I think you have had one of those moments, it happens sometimes. I had one of them the today. One of those legendary moments when someone tells you something that sounds so stupid that the first thought that comes into your head is "Wow, either I'm completely stupid or he/she is". The fact that you find it so unreal that someone throws out something that is so blatantly stupid makes you first question yourself since you think that you must have misunderstood something. Then it strikes you that, no, the other person is 100% serious.

Dealing with severe stupidity is not easy since it usually is not a good strategy to retort with a "Are you stupid or what?" to your boss. My usual strategy is to try and ply around the edges with gentleness to see if something comes loose, but no such luck today. The stupidity wouldn't budge this time and I believe I did what I could without risking a confrontation.

So, what happened you ask? Well, Mr. Chin (obviously) mailed me and wanted me to summarize a power point presentation for him in an excel sheet with page numbers, tag lines of each slides and a brief summary of the slide. Perhaps it is in it's place to mention that tag lines of individual slides are designed to summarize the content of the slide they are in?

The exercise was amusing in it's stupidity and the whole office erupted in a brief moment of merriment of my little predicament at trying to handle this with Mr. Chin over the phone to try and make him see the pointlessness... That it would be too difficult for him to handle clicking through a presentation and try to grasp the content of a presentation just astounded us. This is for a project that he is said to be main responsible manager for and which he would be expected to know the details of...

More of this and I have to start a separate label called "The Stupidity of Mr. Chin"...