Backchannel: why bother

Sometimes I think the extra time I spend making precise posts is a waste of time – sometimes folks seem to willfully misunderstand.   Or maybe I’m on candid camera and someone is trying to find my breaking point.

Well, my self-limited breaking point is one attempt to explain any given position.  Everything else goes backchannel.

This happened at work earlier this week:

**me:** Here is a screencap from a video I shot on [a particular highway corridor] when I drove it yesterday. **engineer:** We need to drive [that corridor] and shoot some video. **me:** (staring in disbelief)

And here is my attempt to partially answer the question “why do people use higher voltage panels?”

Me:  The higher voltage is an antidote to those edge cases where MPPT output drops below PWM (12v poly + high ambient temperatures + high Vabs settings + MPPT efficiency losses).

If there is a clearer way to set up an example edge case I don’t know what it is.  I laid out the factors and the admittedly-uncommon negative result.

It immediately went off the rails.

I do not mind argument/disagreement, and I deeply appreciate being corrected.   That’s all healthy.  What is bizarre to me is to have someone disagree with something you did not say, even after you quote the original statement back to them.  WTF?

One of the dangers of being a community celebrity  (like the respondent above) is the temptation to believe that whatever words you speak are by definition true.