The Three Clicks
If you've never met a MINO, consider yourself lucky.
MINO stands for Manager In Name Only.
We know it’s a real title because it appears on every single organizational chart.
Everything else is... negotiable.
I’m sharing a story with you that happened long before realizing there was a name for managers like him.
At the time, he was simply my manager.
One afternoon, he wandered over to my cubicle and leaned against the partition closest to my chair and stopped.
He wasn't in a rush.
He never seemed to be.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey," I replied.
Then he leaned in closer like someone about to share a brilliant idea, a scheme, or a secret.
"You know..." he began, "I could do what you do."
I looked up from my monitor.
"Oh?"
"Yeah," he said with a grin. "I'd just have to...
...watch a few YouTube videos."
That's why he walked over to my cubicle. That’s why he interrupted my work. That was the entire conversation.
No debate.
No challenge.
No invitation for a response.
Just a statement delivered with absolute confidence.
So I smiled.
Not because I agreed.
Not because I was offended.
Because every once in a while, someone says something that isn't worth your followup.
It just needs time. Let it cook.
So I went back to work.
Life moved on.
Weeks passed.
Maybe longer.
Work has a way of erasing the calendar for some. Reports become Tuesdays. Deadlines become Thursdays. Meetings become Fridays. One week quietly blends into the next, until you stop noticing where one ends and another begins. It’s already a new month, again.
Then one afternoon, I heard footsteps approaching my cubicle, unsure if it’s a passerby or someone coming to me.
"Got a minute?"
I looked up.
It was MINO.
He had his laptop tucked under one arm.
"Absolutely," I replied.
He walks in and places his laptop on my desk and says, “I can't figure this out."
I slid the laptop toward me.
Except...
I couldn't do anything with it.
The file wouldn't open.
Not because it was corrupted.
Not because there was some complicated technical issue.
I could see it had been saved in a file format our systems didn't support.
So before I could solve his problem, I had to solve the problem before the problem.
A few moments later I was able to fix, then open the file.
"Okay," I said. "What's the prob?"
He pointed at the screen, "the page break."
I blinked.
"The page break?" I repeated.
"Yes," he said.
That was it.
No formulas.
No broken links.
No mysterious Excel error.
A page break.
He did not know how to insert a page break.
I reached over.
Three clicks.
Done.
He laughed.
I laughed.
But I am positive we were not laughing at the same thing.
On the surface, this is a story about a page break.
It isn't.
The page break just happened to be the place where an old, unsolicited comment, came back to introduce itself.
"I could do what you do. I just need to watch a few YouTube videos."
Perhaps he should have.
Funny thing about life... it never argues with us when we overestimate ourselves.
It simply waits.
Then, on an otherwise ordinary afternoon, it quietly hands us an opportunity to demonstrate exactly what we meant.
Sometimes that opportunity looks like a multimillion-dollar decision.
Sometimes...
It looks like three clicks.
