K.G. has been working in Information Technology for twenty-five years. He's built systems in COBOL, lead teams of C++ developers, and designed complex applications in ASP.NET. These days, K.G. finds himself taking it easy and picking up the odd freelance job here and the interesting-sounding contract job there. But despite this wealth of knowledge and experience, there is one individual whose expertise transcends it all: The Medical Specialist.

A Medical Specialist is like a doctor's doctor. They have several more years of formal training, often a PhD to go with their MD, and are the people that regular doctors ("Gennies," in specialist-speak) go to when they need advice. K.G. had never directly worked with one before and didn't realize that Medical Specialists are endued with expertise in all fields of study, including software development. So when a Medical Specialist (specifically, an Endocrinologist) approached him to help "clean up" and commercialize some software, K.G. agreed. It sounded like a fun project.

It didn't take long for K.G. to realize how omniscient his new client was. Their first project meeting started off with the specialist saying, "you know, I'd be doing all of this stuff myself, but I've got critical medical things to do." After naming off each project goal, the specialist reminded K.G. how easy it would be to complete: "this isn't endocrinology, after all!"

One of the first things that K.G. needed to do was look through the application to provide a detailed estimate of effort for "cleaning it up." It was a Microsoft Access application (written by the specialist himself) that had a hideous UI (frog-green colors, misaligned buttons, etc), no real code (all functionality was achieved through 832 different macros), and an absurdly-designed database (one table, "Lookup," had a Boolean as the primary key). Obviously, it needed required total redevelopment.

When K.G. delivered his estimate, The Specialist wasn't too happy. He insisted that the application was very well designed and needed only "a few tweaks." After all, The Specialist had been using all sorts of software and working with I.T. people for years: "developing software is child's play; it's not endocrinology, after all!"

K.G. tried to reason with him, kidding-on-the-square with an example a doctor might understand: "Granted, I don't have any formal medical training, but I've been hanging out with doctors for years, watched several seasons of E.R., and even stayed in the hospital for a few nights. Surely, I could just grab a scalpel and do a quick tonsillectomy?"

That didn't go over so well. "First of all," The Specialist snapped, "you're not a doctor! Secondly, you're not licensed to perform any sort of medical work at all! How could you even begin to think that you'd be remotely qualified to perform surgery?!?"

Despite the painfully irony of that statement, The Specialist still insisted that K.G. was dead wrong about software development. Fortunately, they were able to come to an agreement: their contract was nullified and they both went their separate ways. Thankfully, The Specialist has been so busy with his "critical medical things" that he still has not had the time to bestow upon the world his wondrous medical software.

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