Dammit Jim

"DammitJim, I'm a doctor, not an [occupation]!"

As often uttered by Doctor "Bones" McCoy from StarTrekOriginalSeries, and geeks who are asked to do things that just aren't in their job description.

ThinkGeek has a remedy for situations that cause this to be uttered: the "No, I will not fix your computer for you." t-shirt: http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/things/388b.html

Voyager ran "I'm a doctor, not an [occupation]!" into the ground, uttered by the holographic Doctor at least a hundred times.

StarTrekVoyager also ran StarTrek into the ground, for that matter. -- RjLesch

Hmmm. I thought that happened in the '80s. Been tunneling since then

Our field has become quite specialized in the last few decades. When I started out, it was natural to assume that anyone who could write software for a PC could do anything else with them, and with many of us, that was true. But the hardware has developed too fast for me to keep up without compromising those areas that are my BreadAndButter?. (see also: ArsLongaVitaBrevis)

When I got into this field, you built your S-100 bus "PC", and then you programmed it. So, anyone with a PC could, of course, fix it. But then I'm old; I'm really old. ;-> -- JeffGrigg

Gee, Jeff, we must be about the same age. -- GeorgeDinwiddie

I guess I'm from one technological generation up. We all thought people programming PC's with the S-100 bus were dinosaurs. I mean most of them didn't even come with a BASIC (grin). The TRS-80 and Radio Shack Color Computer, the Apple II and the IBM PC were all much cooler. Of course, we still had to put in our own cards, memory, floppy drives, monitors, joysticks... -- KyleBrown

When I started my job in 1989 the programmers were the PC Techs, System Administrators and the Network People (I was even known to run some fanfold paper through the burster). As time has gone by we have increased in size and diversified (we went from 5 people to 20) but people still come to me with issues because they know I can fix them even if it is not my job. It is hard to resist the temptation to play guru and fix every little problem that comes my way. I try hard to defer to the people who are responsible because it is not fair for me to work their turf because I get paid to program and they get paid to do their job(even if they themselves don't mind). -- TobyFarley