What was Data doing before the D?

Wanking off in the holodeck got Barclay to Lieutenant, junior grade. In a potentially alternative timeline, Picard got to the same rank as a wallflower. Perhaps technical skill alone is good enough to get a few ranks in the gold uniform.

 

Eh, didn't Data once say he had 20 something years in Starfleet? In most militaries time served is a large factor in promotions, and the medals for bravery and what not don't hurt either.

 

He was probably a hot topic for a while in the Starfleet newsletters after he was discovered about a quarter century earlier. But people likely reacted to him much in the way the EMH on Voyager was treated initially, as some sort of advanced hardware/software, not as an individual.

One of the best clues is in "The Neutral Zone", when L.Q. "Sonny" Clemonds points at Data and asks Riker, "What is that?" Then Data turns around to see what he's pointing at.

 

He stood in front of a mirror for ten years practicing the perfect sneeze.

 

I like to think starfleet was using him for calculations in some lab somewhere.

 

This is canon. He was a toaster.

 

And not just any toaster. Being fully functional, he was a pop-up toaster.

 

Hey, even Louvoix was intrigued when he described his pop-up functionality with Tasha.

 

In the novel The Buried Age mentionsit was pretty much just that. Assigned to administrative tasks by himself, and for years never stood up for himself. It is an excellent read, by the way.

 

I've always wondered about that since the start of TNG. Perhaps he held posts on ships that were low in class and the crews did not interact much with him. Time served got him promoted high enough and his service record intrigued Picard just enough that he wanted to try him on the Enterprise. He held a high enough posistion there that the crew would be more inclined to interact with him since he was on the senior staff and a bridge officer.

 

Well, Data technically had more experience than Harry Kim when TNG started. With women within 3 episodes.

 

Data must look particularly artificial in person, more so than on the TV screen. There must be something about him that screams "artificial" to an individual from a more technologically advanced society. When he was stuck in the 19th century, no one seemed to think Data was not a human, just that he was particularly pale. Clemonds, though, immediately picks up on Data being something other than human. I wonder if 24th century individuals would initially have an even stronger reaction to Data than Clemonds did.

 

I think the world was considered a bigger place in the 19th-Century and that many thought that it was still full of mysterious things and people they had yet to encounter. As the term "android" (and even "extraterrestrial") was still unknown to many, the only thing Data could be taken for by most was some kind of strange foreigner, IMO.

By the 24th-Century, androids were fairly well-known (with many more human-like in appearance than Data), but all were regarded as merely machines not people. Data was an extreme rarity.

 

Okay, I've been resisting this answer ever since first seeing the title two weeks ago, and I'll use it now since no one else has.

Question: What was Data doing before the D?

Answer: The backstroke, sir.

 

I could have sworn in that episode he mentioned how many years he spent as an ensign, how many years he spent as a lieutenant, etc.

Come to think of it it might have been better if they had started out his career as an ensign. Because as Lt Cmd, you'd think that all the machine sentience issues would come up the first time he comes up for promotion, the first time he's given a leadership role, etc. There'd be debate about whether he should have been admitted to Starfleet, etc. By the time he's reached Lt Commander it's assumed he's already been accepted as sentient and trusted with leadership roles.

 

They did.

The actual line was in "Datalore" (not "Deja Q") when Data answered Lore's question on how to get a Starfleet uniform like his:

"If you get one the way I did, Lore, it will mean four years at the Academy, another three as ensign, ten or twelve on varied space duty in the lieutenant grades."

I think it was a case that there were those that challenged Starfleet's acceptance of Data as being sentient, even after more than a decade of service in Starfleet.

 

Weren't Holodecks relatively new by the time the E-D was launched. If that's so then previous crews he worked with may not have had the experience in interacting with artificial people much less such a real honest to goodness android. That could have kept him isolated, physically and emotionally. His commanding officers may have had him, like Guinan said later in season two, "doing the dirty work." Once holodecks became commonplace, it might have become easier for people to interact with him.

 

Data is probably the one character they could have built another show around, either a prequel or sequel.

For a mundane answer, I would suggest Star Fleet simply loaded him up with work, 24/7 with not even lodgings of his own, and he had no "off time" analogous to human sleep to process non- work related matters, stunting his growth as a person.

Afterall, timewise, he's someone that can put in the hours of 4-5 people, and is at least 4x as efficient as each person. So we're talking about someone who can do the work of 20 people, and that would be hard to not take advantage of. And it might have started innocently enough, with Data subbing for a crewmember on leave on top of normal duties. The promotions may not even been for his benefit and merely give him appropriate access for his tasks, and until his trial, Pocard could have chosen to ignore his rank or summarily lowered it without cause if he wished.

So the previous crews just had less time away from a professional capacity to interact with him and he had less to personal stuff to process. This would make sense with his early appearances as he was quite comfortable with professional conduct but a child once it came to other things.

i would suggest in the academy he was more of an outcast than later on, because teens and young adults can be most like that, especially after the novelty factor wore off and Data coming across as he does.

 

Before he gave Tasha the D? Watch the episode to find out.