Right. I was neither being "frank" nor intentionally laughing at her plan. She was smiling, and I thought she was kidding. I was smiling, and she apparently thought I was approving. Suddenly, we both realized we were wrong. Oops.

At that point, the damage was done. I tried to explain why her approach of changing N things simultaneously wasn't more efficient than changing N things sequentially because of the combinatorial explosion of interactions, but she wasn't technical enough to understand what I meant by that, which made her angrier, and when I suggested an approach that would give us a temporary "Plan B" just in case we "ended up a couple of weeks late", she declared me "unsupportive" and ended the meeting.