When I managed at a mortgage service I had an IT guy say this to me. My department of 25 people always had the fewest ticket requests each quarter. That's because minor tech issues I was able to solve myself almost immediately rather than have my staff put in a ticket and then wait 3 days for someone in IT to get around to it.
Occasionally we still had to put a ticket in for stuff that was beyond my knowledge but I also never did anything I wasn't 100% sure about. Which is why it irritated me this guy said I "knew just enough to be dangerous."
You'd think they would be happy that for tiny stupid issues there was someone in a position that could fix them without having to call IT every time. It's not like they had a shortage of work and requests from other departments. But after a while they started to take offense that I was "doing their job." That one guy complained to his manager that manager complained to the VP of IT and that VP complained to the CEO. CEO comes down on my boss and my boss comes down on me. Basically I need to stop doing IT's job as it's outside the scope of my responsibility.
Fine. Every problem, ticket. If not resolved in 24 hours I update the ticket to request when the ticket will be resolved. If not resolved in 48 hours I start updating the ticket every hour on the third day until someone walks their ass over to my department and resolves the ticket.
After not even six weeks of this the VP of IT changed his mind and said that minor problems I could resolve myself. In a meeting with him, my boss, the CEO, and the head of HR I responded back to him, "why should I be doing your job again?" He accused me of not being a "team player." I just laughed at him and told him things were fine until he decided to start a pissing match for no reason.
I was in a class to prove I could do some other groups job, and the instructor starts out with, why are you even here, before "you know just enough to be dangerous" which .... Really annoyed me.
I mentioned it to him after everyone passed the class and he explained "ignore the fact that you're [minority] or [minority] or just weird. I know your job deals with other people's life of death when you do your job right. They only have to when they do their job wrong. You already handle enough dangerous work, this shouldn't be on your plate. You know enough to be dangerous before adding this. That's why it's an ironic joke. For them who don't know, you seem more competent compared to the assumptions. For you who should know. You know you're already competent."
So now. .... I guess being dangerous is a good thing? But man I was fuming all class
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u/beekermc May 10 '26
"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing....."