It's true that this is the fastest way to handle pagination, but it can really fast become too ugly to code, since you have to do that manually, instead of just specifying offset and limit and let the DB engine to it.
On the other hands, approach Google takes seems more sensible to me, if you have more that some maximum number of results, just refuse to paginate further. Instruct the user to narrow down his query criteria instead. What could be the use for "go to page 1235 / 5433" if not for some kind of crawling database content?
Sounds to me like the boss is an idiot. Did they really need to screw around with a web conference just to demonstrate that there was a bug in the sales history display?
He should have had Sue just paste a couple of before/after screenshots into a doc file with a sentence or two of explanation and send it to Ed.
"Here's the sales history for R27-93 (screenshot)... I hit F5, F3, F7 and the part number now incorrectly shows GT548 (screenshot)..."
That's very elegant. It's amazing (and a little terrifying) to think that he may very well have been able to mentally visualize the fluid dynamics to some extent. It's not like he was consciously solving navier-stokes, but it's still incredible what some human minds are capable of.
But then, he was thinking a lot about electron flow and built up a good intuition that had wider application. That doesn't make it any less amazing to me though. I'd like to be able to do that.