after several years working in an industry where every task can have very serious bad effects if done wrong, but every task is also extremely complex and requires many steps, most of which are done by people who do not understand the full process

…I have developed a paranoia-level awareness that anything I do could later get questions like “who told you to do that and why??”

and if I don’t have a ready answer, it is assumed that I just… decided to do it, out of nowhere

and if the thing was done wrong– or even if someone somewhere thinks it was done wrong– that’s negative points against my perceived competency as an employee

Which means I’ve developed a habit of making very thorough documentation of who told me to do things and what they said their reason was

(especially if I can’t get them to explain it in a way I fully understand)

(a thing that happens a lot in my workplace, where my questions rarely seem to get answered, because there is always a communication gap where everyone is only half listening to me and answering something vaguely adjacent to what I actually said)

However.

this rigorous documentation can also, unfortunately, get interpreted as being “hostile” toward coworkers and trying to “push blame onto them”

and can lead to several wasted hours of getting yelled at and interrupted and misinterpreted some more as I try to explain my reasoning

sigh.

guess my documentation is gonna go in private notebooks from now on.