My most popular post over the last two years is “Don’t Argue If They Won’t Listen” and I honestly find it kind of funny how perennially relevant that is to my life. I was spurred to write that post after being talked over by someone who continued to insist I was wrong despite having no evidence or relevant experience to back up their claim. They were never able to provide a reason for this assertion and their subsequent insistence on ignoring my advice (that they had solicited) on a topic I happened to know a lot about forever changed the nature of our relationship. I was no longer willing to engage with them on anything but a surface level and I let distance grow between us since, prior to that point, I was the one doing most of the work to keep conversation going and make contact. Now, we rarely talk (this greater distance helped by the fact that this person also moved away a few months later) and while I miss the friendship, I do not miss the way it made me feel all the time. Unfortunately, as I’ve come to realize in my professional life, walking away or keeping your silence isn’t always an option.

Recently, I’ve become a subject matter expert in one of the most difficult and painful areas that my team researches and develops in. I’ve done a lot of testing and analysis to figure out the primary cause of a type of issue that has plagued the team for years now, ultimately figuring out that most of the issues being logged were being misattributed to one thing and that even more of them weren’t actually issues but symptoms. I’m being purposefully vague because, even though I’m writing about it more and more on my blog, I try to keep my professional life separate from my personal and writing life (which is, perhaps, my most personal life of all). I spent a large amount of time developing this level of expertise, inviting people to participate in my testing, finding information to better frame the testing I was doing, and collecting as much real-world data as I could in order to bridge what seemed like a huge gap between our testing lab and the systems our customers installed. It was a monumental task that took most of the month of November (including two incredibly stressful weeks at the outset of the month), but I was able to conclusively prove a lot of things, some of which I hadn’t even set out to prove.

I am incredibly proud of the work I did. I don’t think anyone else on the team could have managed it because it required my level of organization, my style of lateral thinking, and my ability to not only hold a bunch of information in my head at the same time, but also my ability to foresee the consequences of my actions in a way that makes it easier for me to target my testing efforts. I’m sure my coworker could have done a great job as well, but the final result is probably something only I could have done and it provided a great deal of information that is of interest to not only my team, but all the departments in the company that work with my team. Unfortunately, because I’ve been working on one crisis after another since this particular thing stopped being a crisis and started being a testing research project, I haven’t had time to write up my testing report.

I’ve talked to tons of people about what I learned, both at the time and in the months since, but the further we get from the time I did this testing, the more skeptical people become of what I’m telling them. I’ve now had to have the “here’s my conclusions” conversation with multiple people multiple times because some of them just don’t believe me (which is a result of everyone incorrectly assuming they knew why the problem at the core of my research was happening for almost five years before I cracked it wide open) and one of them either can’t understand my explanation or refuses to understand it because it contradicts what he feels is the experiences he’s had with the product (and I’m 95% sure its the latter). It is incredibly defeating to have done this work, to be recognized by literally everyone as the person who currently knows the most about this subject, and to be constantly ignored or refuted by people who can’t provide a reason that I’m wrong but trust their guts over all my research.

Which, you know, is sort of a microcosm of the world at large right now. It’s not difficult to see the parallels between this and the way people latched on to ivermectin, anti-vax conspiracies, and refusing to wear masks. People aren’t interested in facts when those facts contradict the things they feel are true. Which bugs the hell out of me when it causes people to ceaselessly and groundlessly tell me I’m wrong about something I have literal scientific proof that I am correct. It was probably the most conclusive testing result my team has ever gotten because my boss told me that, if I was going to do it at all, I should do it as completely as physically possible. Which I did. Now, all I can hope is that taking a few days away from my other high-priority work will give me the time and mental space I need to write up that report, put in all my data, and spread the word about my testing and its conclusions to anyone in the company willing to listen. And, you know, hope that people will actually listen when presented with something that exhaustively tested and explained. It feels like a vain hope since I apparently can’t even convince one of the people who helped with the testing that my conclusion is correct two and a half months after we finished the main part of the testing, but it’s all I’ve got. I can’t look to the future and imagine what my life would be like if no one believes me and keeps telling me that their chance encounters and third-hand anecdotes trump my exhausting and rigorous testing methodology. It would be too defeating and I’ve got enough stuff going on in my life at work that is this defeating without adding something so much more personally destroying that the rest of it.

So, yeah. If you can walk away from someone who won’t listen or even just stay silent as they spout incorrect information like its fact, do so. You won’t always be able to afford taking that option, though, since sometimes your job and the justification for all the time and effort you’ve put into something requires that you defend it even against the people who will never believe you. Sometimes you need to repeat yourself and keep arguing with a wall because you are responsible for something like the quality of products being shipped out and it will be on your head if you let that slip because someone chose to believe their gut over your data. It really sucks, but it sucks a lot less than losing your job or geting shuffled into a career deadend because you’re reliable enough to fill a Warm Body position but not enough to be actually trusted with anything important. The bad stuff might still make it out of the building, but at least you’ll have records that you tried to stop it.