A colleague and I are working together to design a geographic information system for a client. Not the hardware and software – we did that too, of course, but that’s easy-peasy. Now we’re into the real fun of plotting out the database templates with projection specifications and metadata protocols. I love this stuff. I love this nitty gritty business of file naming structures and data classified by originator and geography and type. It’s like the satisfaction one acquires when solving a rubik’s cube. I bring order to chaos. Entropy is beaten back for one more day.
Those of my readers who have seen the state of my living room might marvel that there is a meticulous side to my personality. Who are you and what have you done with Swingbug? My house might be cluttered but, I assure you, my file system is immaculate.
There is a time and place for obsessive compulsive orderliness. I live in my living room. I breathe and move and dance and play here. Life is messy. So be it. But my computer, I function here. Neat and tidy. Straight lines. Clean desktops. Folders inside folders inside folders. This is where my inner geek dwells.
Many people think I picked up my geek from my husband. I resent the implication. While I have learned many useful bits of techie information from my husband, I could recite all three Star Wars movies before I met him, thank you very much. Of course his geekiness was a definite plus. Shawn was the first man I ever allowed to get his hands inside the casing of my Macintosh PowerPC 7100/600; it must be true love.
An undisclosed friend of mine once told me about a trip to the Apple Store with a fellow she was seeing. She blushed as she said, “It’s so hot when they speak geek.” I patted her on the hand. “Yeah, I know.” We sighed together.
To any young men out there in my reading audience, do not hide your inner geek. Your in-depth knowledge of Jem’Hadar battle strategies is not necessarily a turn-off. Another friend of mine is currently engaged to be married to man who proposed to her while they were watching Star Trek. What did her girlfriends say? “Ohh, that’s perfect. Which episode?”
So shout it all around the world cause the geeks get the girls.
Geekdom, in its myriad forms, is nothing to be ashamed of. In this dawning age of digital technology, there is a little geek in all of us, I think. You wouldn’t believe how many sci-fi fans have crawled out of the woodwork and timidly tugged my shirt sleeve since I wrote that space sheep blog last month. People I never would have guessed at are secretly hiding seasons of Battlestar Galactica behind their TV sets when company comes over.
Come out of the closet, folks. It’s okay. You are not alone in the universe. You can wear your SQL t-shirts and Vulcan ear prosthetics with pride. No one will ostracize you for knowing three different ways to crack the DRM on an MP3 (far from it) or twitching when people can’t use hypothesis properly in a sentence. If you are secretly building your very own theremin in your garage, I, at the very least, want to know about it. Come out in the open and join our ranks. Borg of feather flock together.
I’d love to stay and chat but I have a data storage system I’m eager to beta test today and a couple of white papers on metadata synchronization to read. Sunlight on your road, good friends.