We're Not IT: The Line Every Biomed Says on Repeat

"We're Not IT (Love Y'all Though)" is built around a sentence every biomed has said more times than they can count, delivered as a call-and-response sorting game: printer jam, that's IT. Pump alarm, that's us.

Where the song came from

The idea comes from a genuinely common piece of workplace friction: biomeds are routinely mistaken for IT help-desk staff, despite doing electro-mechanical medical device work that has almost nothing to do with password resets or email. The song plays that friction for laughs, sorting the day's calls one at a time, while making sure the chorus never turns the joke mean.

Boots on, badge flipped, cart squeakin' down the hallSomebody hollers, 'Hey, IT!' — yeah, I get that callI can't reset your password and I don't touch your mailBut that monitor beside the bed, now that's my detail

Why the two jobs keep colliding anyway

That collision isn't going away, either. One biomed technician can now be responsible for up to 1,200 devices, tracked through the same barcode-scanning work-order systems that fill most of a shift. And as more of those devices join the hospital network, clinical engineering's safety-first approach and IT's security-first approach increasingly have to function as one team, even when, as the song notes, the IT department is often ten times the size of the biomed shop down the hall.

One tech can cover up to twelve hundred machinesScanner on my hip and a meter in my jeans

That friction isn't unique to any one hospital, either. As medical devices increasingly ship with their own network addresses, the line between who fixes it and who secures it keeps blurring, and biomeds have ended up doing both jobs' worth of worrying about a single networked pump without necessarily getting either job's title. The chorus's sorting game, printer jammed, that's IT, pump alarm, that's us, works precisely because both halves of it are true at once on a modern hospital floor. Nobody in the song is trying to dodge work; they're trying to get help to the right person fast, which matters more than pride when a device stops working mid-shift.

That's also why the bridge never treats the joke as a grievance. It ends on gratitude, not a complaint, a reminder that the two departments only look separate on an org chart, not in an actual emergency. That's what makes the bridge the real heart of the song: we're not IT, but we need IT, that's for sure. The joke depends on the two teams needing each other the moment the network goes down at night, which is exactly when the distinction the whole chorus draws stops mattering and the knock on the door happens anyway.