One of the most frustrating experiences I have far too often at work is that I am ultimately proven right about something. It happens often enough that I stopped keeping track, but apparently not often enough that anyone remembers how frequently it happens. That or they’re just ignoring it because I haven’t gone and rubbed anyone’s nose in it. As much as you might think otherwise, given my propensity for predicting bad outcomes and the frequency with which my warnings are proven out, I don’t enjoy telling people that I told them so. There is little joy in those moments for me since I don’t particularly appreciate seeing other people struggle or suffer, and I get little satisfaction from having been correct that something bad would happen when that bad thing has happened. Usually, there’s lots of work to do and my life has suddenly become more difficult as I either have to lend a hand to clean up whatever mess (literal or metaphorical) has been made or have to find a way to still do my work in what has become a shortened timeline. I don’t have the time to bask in being right and everyone is usually better served if I don’t point out how wrong they were, how right I was, and how they should listen to me in the future. People’s feelings get hurt by things like that and it usually makes people less likely to listen in the future, not more likely. That said, I’m beginning to wonder if maybe I should be making a point of it more often than I do.

I don’t mean that I should walk up to a coworker or interrupt a meeting to inject a rude “I told you so!” when something serious or stressful is going on. I should maybe write these things down more than I already do and then go to my boss after the fact to point out that I predicted this issue and was ultimately proven correct, despite my best efforts to steer the group away. I’m not sure how well that would go, but I think it might eventually buy me some more credence when I speak up about things. It would be nice even if all it accomplished was not having my warnings brushed away instantly as nothing more than dour pessimism. Not that my boss is super dismissive of what I have to say, only that he is sometimes dismissive and it is frustrating to be stuck on the sidelines as a disaster (well, “disaster” might be too strong a word for most times this happens, but it isn’t always too strong a word) looms and then befalls a project because I am the final step in all projects and have little to no say in how anything gets done. Some of which is changing, I’ll admit, as more and more of the team recognizes my note-taking as being a source of truth they can rely on and stops questioning me every time I remind them of something we talked about months ago.

Today’s post and all this reflection is the result of a similar thing happening today at work. I can’t give specifics for a lot of reasons (some of them privacy concerns and some of them legal concerns due to rules around discussing projects I’m working on), but it was really my entire experience as a knowledgeable tester playing out over the course of an hour. I was doing some potentially dangerous testing using a method and setup I’d devised, but it required a lot of other people standing around and watching because it was ultimately their collective decision when the test results got too severe to continue or whether a difficult case passed or failed (a line we only had because of my work the day before, conversationally sledgehammering people until they actually gave me goals and conditions I could work with). My boss made a suggestion about changing the test because he was concerned about the safety and everyone else standing around said it seemed like a good idea. I objected since that would take us far away from a real-world scenario and that leaving things as-is was an important part of testing the full mechanical system in use. Everyone else hemmed and hawed for another few minutes and my boss, despite my continued protests, made the decision to change the test in pursuit of what he felt was a safer testing procedure. Since there was nothing I could do at that point, I went along with it. And then the results we got drastically changed for the worse, we did two tests with these incredibly bad results, and then my boss told us to restore my original test setup since, as it turned out, the person running the test and who had the most experience with the system was correct.

Since we’d all wasted an hour and a great deal of effort, I didn’t say anything and pitched in to get the work done. As we wrapped it up and the group of observers dispersed while I started resetting the test apparatus, I heard my boss telling the group that I was correct as usual and that we should just keep testing as I directed. Which was very gratifying, don’t get me wrong, but it was also incredibly frustrating to hear the “as usual” tacked onto the end there, since we could have saved ourselves some time and wear-and-tear on the system I’m testing if we’d just done what I said initially. I’ve spent more time using this system than everyone else put together, so I’ve got the best operational understanding of it and I really wish that this kind of knowledge was better respected. Sure, I can’t do the math to figure out the forces involved, but I know the feel of it better than anyone else. I know how it works intuitively better than anyone else. My suggestions should be weighted accordingly, when it comes to the things I’m working with every single day.

I did eventually get a fun little joke in, later on. When my boss said something that included my name that I couldn’t hear, I shouted over to him to repeat it. When he said something (jokingly) snide about not repeating it because he didn’t want it to go to my head, I pretended I couldn’t hear him still and yelled “What? I can’t hear you over the sound of how right I was.” It got a lot of laughs from the group standing around while I set up the next test, but it was also the first time I’ve ever said anything that could be construed as an “I told you so.” I’d bet all the money I’ve made on overtime this week that nothing will substantially change as a result of this, but I might stop letting these moments go unremarked, if only for my own peace of mind. Being the bigger person is an important tool to have at your disposal since it is frequently the best path toward moving forward on collaborative projects, but maybe letting people see that you know what you’re talking about is another important tool I need to develop. There’s obviously a fine line this sort of thing would need to walk, but I think it might do me some good to give it a try. Nothing else has helped, after all. This is all that’s really left other than continued silent acceptance of nothing ever changing.