Not to say your boss was totally in the right, but if he thought the summary statistics could never be negative (due to knowledge of the source and meaning of t

Not to say your boss was totally in the right, but if he thought the summary statistics could never be negative (due to knowledge of the source and meaning of the data) that can be very informative. If I were told the numbers {1,2,100} and that the data was definitely non-negative, I'd fit the thing to an exponential perhaps and thus set my 95% error bounds as (1.74, 101). Which isn't a whole lot better than the mean/sigma stuff, but it would take into account the non-negativity.