Conversation with a Baby Engineer

I'm working on a project for a boss, Saul. Saul sent me some forecast curves generated by one of our young, somewhat recent engineering hires, Ricky. (Names changed to protect, well, me.) When I looked at the curves, they were unfortunately printed in such a way that the parameters I needed were not printed on them. Once I realized this, I called Ricky.

Me: Hey, Ricky. Remember these curves you did for Project X?
Ricky: Oh yeah, sure.
Me: Unfortunately I can't get the Qi or the initial decline off them because, when you printed them, the walk point was way down the curve.
Ricky: Oh, that's too bad.
Me: Yeah. So, do you know what those are, or can you open them and look?
Ricky: Shit. I don't know if I saved those, or what project I did them in. Let me look and call you back.
Me: All right.

[Two minutes later]

Ricky: Hey, Tam. Yeah, I don't think I saved those. Do you need me to redo them?
Me: Yes, unless you have some magical engineer way to calculate the decline from the curve - I don't know how, but it seems like maybe you could. I can guess the Qi from the graph, but I don't know how to get the decline.
Ricky: You can do it with graph paper, but it's probably easier to just redo it.
Me: OK.
Ricky: So do you want me to do that?
Me: Whatever's easiest for you.
Ricky: OK, well, let me finish up what I'm doing and I'll do that next thing.
Me: OK.

I'm sorry to admit that my first impulse, before calling Ricky, was just to send an email back to Saul explaining why the document that Ricky sent was not useful. Then it occurred to me to maybe not throw my coworker under the bus. Heh.