I seem to be unable to have a normal week after a vacation, still. Antidepressants and taking time to rest haven’t helped at all with that particular problem. At least this time, it’s a problem I can roll with, to a degree. To a degree. See, I had my usual Wednesday of meetings, but I discovered that there was yet more stuff going on that I didn’t know about and got to witness multiple people assign credit for the work I’d been doing the past three months to my senior coworker. Who, thankfully, spoke up to say he didn’t do it, but it shouldn’t have happened from the beginning considering all the people in that meeting knew about the issue at hand because I told them about. I am also on the record just two weeks prior saying that my senior coworker, due to the timing of his vacations, was relatively uninvolved in the related testing (though I left out that he found the first hint of this problem and promptly dropped the entire thing on my lap rather than continue to work on it himself). But no. Everyone was operating under the assumption that my coworker was the person who knew what was up and had been doing the three-digit number of hours of testing involved. All of which came around and made a pretty fine point as a plausible explanation for why people were being so weird about me working from home and not having some kind of publically available accounting of my work. If everyone assumed that most of the work I’ve been doing was done by my senior coworker, it would explain a lot of stuff going back a few years.

I don’t know how to solve this particular problem, though, because it is tied hand-in-hand with some other problems. Primary among them the fact that people don’t contact me about stuff. If there’s an email chain about some problem from support, I only ever see it once someone remembers to add me a few days in. If someone has a question about anything relating to the stuff I work on, they will ask my senior coworkers and will only follow up with me half the time when my senior coworkers tell them to talk to me about it since I’m the expert in whatever it was. If there’s a discussion happening about some project, I have to look out for them and insert myself since no one thinks to involve me, leaving me to find out about stuff days later (assuming I ever find out about it). As far as so many people in this company are concerned, I just don’t exist. Which makes it even more difficult for people to see me working because my name never comes up in these email chains or in citations for how problems were resolved, especially because one of my senior coworkers will just tell me about a problem he knows I can solve, will watch me solve it or figure out what’s happening, and then put that information into the email chain himself. Referencing me as the one who figured it out, thankfully, but I still almost never get added to those messages.

I’ve been with my employer for just under nine years. I’m not a junior employee by any stretch of the word. I’ve become an expert in several of our products and been the lead tester on several projects going back six or seven years now. I am the knowledgebase the other testers reference, I can find any scrap of information that exists in any digital folder I have access to, and have taken the lead on every major change our team has had to our research and development process. I’ve helped everyone understand how to use our requirement management tools and issue management programs better. I can find a way to meet any software-tool-based need anyone on our team has and am often called in to help them out. And yet, when the time comes to think about who needs to be involved in anything, my name almost never comes up. I’m not even the youngest person on the team anymore, not by a long shot, so I’ve got no idea why this is such an insurmountable problem for everyone. I don’t know what I can even do about this now that things seem to have clicked into place in a way that would be incredibly vindicating for me, vis-a-vis my boss telling me that people were mentioning to him that they had no idea what I was doing. I could talk to my boss about it, but I’ve been bringing it up for years that I don’t get included on email chains or told about stuff that’s happening and he’s had no ideas how to solve it since it’s not like any of my coworkers go to him to figure out who to include. They just fire off their emails and somehow always forget me.

This potentially unsolveable problem has weighed heavily on me this week (the week I wrote this) since it is essentially a justification of how missused and taken-for-granted I’ve felt over the last ten months with my current employer. If everyone chalks up my work to my senior coworker, how am I supposed to let anyone know what work I’m doing, especially when I’ve done that and they STILL credited my senior coworker rather than me? How can I get people to remember to add me to email chains and discussions without setting up some kind of periodic vocal reminder that I exist and should be added to these communications so I don’t spend two weeks not doing something before someone gets frustrated with me for doing not doing something I didn’t know needed doing? Hell, I can’t even get added to role-wide communications or to inter-department meetings because, somehow, everyone outside my department forgets I exist at all. I’ve only made it to the various functions that I NEEDED to be at because someone, the week of the event, realized I should be involved and forwarded me the information I would have loved to have a month prior when everyone else got it. It’s just so frustrating. Most people want fewer messages or emails or whatever, but my job is apparently being imperilled because people forget I exist despite all my efforts to remind them I do, all the work I do, and my various visible qualities. I need more of them! And I can’t think of a single way to solve this other than calling into the PA system every single day in order to remind everyone that there are three testers on my team and if it has anything do with anything other than networking or the physical hardware of our products, I am probably the person they actually want to talk to.