Somebody else's problem

Somebody Else's Problem (also known as someone else's problem or SEP) is a phrase coined comedically by Douglas Adams, which has passed into the vernacular.

Origin

Within Template:H2G2 of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy science fiction series, his character Ford Prefect describes Somebody Else's Problem as,

The narration then explains:

In popular culture

French president Nicolas Sarkozy warned the U.S. Congress that "The [decline of the] dollar cannot remain someone else's problem. If we are not careful, monetary disarray could morph into economic war. We would all be victims."

The New York Times said that when the Shah of Iran was exiled in 1979 he became "someone else's problem" from the point of view of President Carter's administration.

Referring to a team working on a computer programming project, Alan F. Blackwell once wrote: "Many sub-goals can be deferred to the degree that they become what is known amongst professional programmers as an 'S.E.P.' – somebody else's problem."

Christopher Negus, writing on the origin of Unix at Bell Labs in the 1970s, described Bell Labs at the time as "a think tank where ideas came first and profits were somebody else's problem".

See also

• Buck passing
• Bystander effect
• Externality
• First they came ...
• Global issue
• Inattentional blindness
• NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard)
• Other people's money
• Sheeple