Okay, let me tell you what went down. It’s one of those things that just grinds your gears over time, you know?
I started this job a while back. Pretty decent place, or so I thought. The work was interesting, stuff I actually wanted to do, involving understanding people and how they use things. Not pure math, not by a long shot.
But here’s the kicker. Somewhere along the line, maybe during the interview or just idle chit-chat, it came out that I did okay in AP Stats back in high school. Like, years and years ago. Ancient history. Honestly, I barely remembered half of it.
Suddenly, that became my defining characteristic in the office. Seriously. Any time numbers came up, even basic stuff like calculating averages from a user survey or looking at simple percentages, heads would turn to me. “Let’s get the stats guru to look at this!” or “Hey, AP Stats, what do you think?”
At first, I kinda laughed it off. But it kept happening. Every. Single. Time. It was like my actual job title, the skills I was hired for, the stuff I worked hard on every day, just didn’t exist. I was reduced to this one thing I did when I was, like, 17.
It Got Old Fast
It wasn’t just annoying; it started to feel dismissive. They put me in this little box labeled ‘numbers’. My insights on user behavior? My ideas for design improvements? Suddenly less important, or viewed only through a ‘quantitative’ lens, even when that wasn’t the point.
I remember working on this report about user feedback. Lots of qualitative stuff, real quotes, pain points. I presented it, focusing on the user stories. The first question? “Can you run a regression analysis on this?” Dude, it was like 20 user quotes! What regression? It completely missed the whole point of the feedback.
They weren’t seeing me or my work; they were seeing a label they’d stuck on me.
- Project discussions? “Let’s have AP Stats handle the data part.” Even if the ‘data part’ was just making a simple chart in Excel.
- Brainstorming sessions? My ideas were sometimes met with, “Huh, didn’t expect that from the numbers guy.”
- It felt like I constantly had to prove I was more than just that one class from forever ago.
Putting My Foot Down
I got fed up. Really fed up. It was subtle at first, just correcting people. “Actually, my focus here is on the user experience,” or “That stats stuff was a long time ago, let’s look at the qualitative feedback.”
Then I had to get more direct. In one meeting, someone called me ‘AP Stats’ again, and I just stopped. Paused. Looked them in the eye and said, “Please don’t call me that. My name is [My Name], and I’m the [My Job Title]. The stats class was nearly a decade ago and isn’t really relevant to this project.”
It got awkward for a second. But you know what? It mostly stopped after that, at least from the people in that room. Some folks needed reminding, but I just kept calmly correcting them. I started actively highlighting the non-quantitative parts of my work in updates and presentations.
It took conscious effort, making sure people saw the value I was actually bringing, not the value they assumed I had based on a high school course. It’s draining having to constantly manage perceptions like that.
So yeah. That’s the story. It’s not about hating stats, it’s about hating being shoved into a tiny, inaccurate box. Don’t reduce people to one single thing from their past. See the whole person. That’s all.
