Skills
While they are extremely diligent in using their surgical skills among themselves they are also careful to share them among the people around their homes, possibly in a bid to make sure that when the torch-bearing mob comes along to kill the latest freak of science the resident Igor will be spared. The tradition is that people helped by an Igor later allow it to have a "rummage around" for useful organs after they die. If the Igor is turned away from the house, no Igor will help that village again. The Igor clan motto is, "What goeth around, cometh around... or thtopth."
Beyond surgery, Igors have an advanced knowledge of what they call "bio-artificing" (a kind of genetic engineering which, on the Discworld, involves "very small stitches") and often create "pets" for themselves, such as dogs made from various dog breeds and a rabbit with human ears growing out of it. A hamster created by such methods apparently broke out of its cage and chewed off a man's leg before flying away. An Igor's expertise in human surgery also extends to the veterinary world; there is known to be one horse in Ankh-Morpork, owned by Hobson's livery stables (which employs an Igor), with a longitudinal seam extending the entire circumference of the animal, sewn together from the remains of a particularly nasty collision. It is advisable, when asking an Igor about his job, not to allow your imagination to follow his answer all the way. It is also hinted in Unseen Academicals that their knowledge goes beyond the biological, for instance they know the secret of creating gold.
They have a strange ability to be at your side (or just behind you) when you call them, and at a door before you knock. Their other ability, returning to a room unnoticed while having previously left through a door, is possibly a spoof of the common bloopers and mistakes in old horror movies. They also have a knack for making any door they open creak; Igors who take up long-term residence in a particular place will often cultivate these creaks via careful lack of oiling.
Read more about this topic: Igor (Discworld)
Famous quotes containing the word skills:
“The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process—a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made—constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes—but photographs, as the man on the street put, were taken.”
—Jean Szarkowski (b. 1925)
“The naive notion that a mother naturally acquires the complex skills of childrearing simply because she has given birth now seems as absurd to me as enrolling in a nine-month class in composition and imagining that at the end of the course you are now prepared to begin writing War and Peace.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Many women are reluctant to allow men to enter their domain. They don’t want men to acquire skills in what has traditionally been their area of competence and one of their main sources of self-esteem. So while they complain about the male’s unwillingness to share in domestic duties, they continually push the male out when he moves too confidently into what has previously been their exclusive world.”
—Bettina Arndt (20th century)