Today has been shitty and exhausting. Not the usual kind of shitty where it’s mostly my depression, my despair at the world in general, or me needlessly spiraling over some unlikely anxiety, nor is i shitty in the sudden-crisis-at-work kind of way. No, today, I got to spend four hours doing manual labor I can’t talk to anyone about to test a project I can’t talk about in any level of specificity while being watched by a bunch of people who frequently ignored my advice and all but shouted me down when I suggested that something they were worried about wasn’t actually a problem based on the hundreds of hours of experience I’ve gotten with the product at the heart of this project. I had to spend ten minutes enduring their nattering and catastrophizing about how what they observed could be the source of all these problems we’ve been trying to solve for months now before I could prove myself correct (that it was an optical illusion caused by their point of view and multi-directional movement of the thing I was moving around). I wasn’t going to let them interrupt my data collection to do the unnecessary thing they wanted to do, since that would require dismantling the current test, doing an entirely different test, setting my current test back up again, and then calibrating the measuring tools again. It took me all of a minute to prove they were wrong when I finally set their test up in a much faster and easier way than they thought it had to be done. As I moved to continue testing following their reluctant agreement that I was correct, one of them said “and now we’re never going to hear the end of it.” That really soured my mood, which is worth remarking since I wasn’t in a great mood already based on the whole “hours of manual labor while those coworkers stood around and wrote down numbers or pressed buttons” thing.

I’m incredibly tired of being proven right when I actually voice a challenge to someone. I’m tired of biting my tongue until I’m incredibly certain of something, finally speaking up, and still being discounted despite the clear expertise I’ve gained in how this product works. Outside of the nitty-gritty mechanical, electrical, and software specifics that no one will ever need to know, no one knows more about the project and product than me. I wish we could skip from this stage of constant doubt and dubious acceptance of my proposals to the day when my coworkers will be coming to me with every single question that have about this product since they all know I know the most about it. That’s how every project and product I’ve worked on has gone and all my attempts to get to that point early this time around, since it’s something entirely unprecedented for my team to be making, have failed to actually gain me anything but a longer list of frustrating situations in which I’m right and everyone complains about it once I prove it (a thing I have to do because they demand to know what’s actually going on and don’t believe my explanation is enough when I could just spend fifteen to one hundred minutes proving my assertions in front of their eyes). I’ve lost track of how many times this has happened. Sure, I only wrote about it once, but it happens all the time and I’m just so sick of being doubted every step of the way.

In the linked post above, I wrote about trying to tell people “I told you so” more often, to drive home the point that they really should listen to me when I speak up, but I have a really difficult time doing it. I don’t like being mean and telling someone “I told you so” feels like twisting the knife in a situation where no one should have been stabbed, metaphorically or otherwise. There’s no need for that level of combativeness since we’re all literally on the same team and trying to accomplish the same goals and I don’t like being the one who introduces any kind of adversarial implications to my relationships with the engineers I work with. After all, as a tester, most engineers start with a baseline level of combativeness since they view our jobs as opposed. They make things and I tell them how the things they made are wrong, broken, or bad. It has taken me seven years to get most of them past this view, to see us as working towards the same goal from complimentary directions. My job isn’t to break things so much as to help refine them. I’m not looking for problems, I’m making sure things work. I’m not being pessimistic, I’m evaluating risks and predicting outcomes so we can avoid as many of the early pitfalls as possible. Together, we’re making something better than it otherwise would have been. So now, even when I predict a pitfall and they step right into it because they ignored me or I reassure them that something they think is a problem is merely a trick of their eyes and they spend ten minutes chattering anxiously about it until I can prove to them that they’re worried over nothing, I avoid doing anything that might shift things back in an adversarial direction because, as my coworker’s comment proves, they’re always one step away from it all on their own.

I do not have the emotional fortitude to deal with all the stress coming in from living in the US’ particular brand of late-stage capitalism and failing governance on top of just how defeating it is to spend four hours as the sole person doing a bunch of manual labor that everyone’s standing around watching while having your proven expertise completely ignored. Today has left me feeling down and exhausted in a way that I haven’t since before my vacation and I can already tell that this is going to eat at me for at least the rest of the week [it has even made it through the weekend, not just because of how much this has been eating at me but also because my latest week began with a full day of convincing people I know what I’m talking about all over again]. I spent my entire childhood having my experiences, feelings, and knowledge invalidated by my parents, older relatives, and older sibling, so I have very little patience for it as an adult. I have to put up with some amount of it, though, because I am at the bottom of the ladder at work and still seem as a “young” employee despite being in my thirties. I wish I could say that it was decreasing as my coworkers see me repeatedly prove myself on project after project, but it only seems to get worse now that I’m starting to assert myself more and more as my knowledge and capabilities continue to grow. I don’t know what it is going to take to get the point across since I’m already the person everyone turns to in meetings to remember what we’ve done previously or to find some weird, hidden bit of knowledge. You’d think they’d have stopped by now and could take me at word for once about literally anything outside of what we talked about during our last meeting, but it would seem not.