Technical
I’m a Mac person. No, it’s OK. You have your OS, I have mine. We can peacefully co-exist.
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Political
Neither major political party in the United States represents my political views very well. If I were to align myself with a party at this point, it would probably be the Libertarian Party, but don’t hold your breath. I’m not much of a joiner, though I’m definitely a voter.
Spiritual
I was raised Lutheran, but I grew out of it. Sorry about that, Mom.
I have no religious affiliation, nor do I have an underlying set of beliefs that one could consider spiritiual at all. I’m mostly one of those tedious materialists, I’m afraid. It would be nice to be able to believe in some higher power, but I just can’t. Evolution makes much more sense to me than Intelligent Design.
Hey, I’m not saying if you believe in God, I think you’re an idiot or anything like that. I have a great deal of respect for people of faith. I am, however, opposed to any religious movement which attempts to use its dogma to oppress the free will of other people. Still, I go to a Catholic school. What the hell do I know?
Psychological
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-HA HA Ha ha.
Content
So, I started work at this place in Albany, New York doing technical software support. Lucky me.
Two other guys started the same day. We showed up on the first day and waited in the lobby for about an hour until the HR people were ready for us. After filling out mountains of paperwork, we were taken to the technical support department. A sort of stout, pleasant-faced woman came for us and introduced herself as one of the technical support managers. She had a sheet of paper with our desk assignments, and we dutifully followed her around the department, like good little ducklings, while she dropped us off one-by-one at our work stations.
The first guy to be dropped off, Dave, immediately began decorating his cubicle with Star Trek miniature figures, which he was producing from his coat pockets with almost supernatural rapidity. The second guy, John, was quiet like me, but I suspect that had more to do with the cloud of smoke that rolled out of his car in the parking lot when he arrived this morning. His shirt had ketchup stains on it. Within the day, Dave was fired for hacking the corporate mail server and sending nasty messages to all his friends from our new employer’s domain. He might have gotten away with it if he hadn’t bragged about it to the first person who came around to introduce herself. Of course, he had no way of knowing she was the director of the department. I just think a little discretion would have been advisiable, like perhaps not violating every corporate IT policy within the first hour of one’s employment.
Great, the sloppy greasy stoner, the spaz “hacker” and me. I could feel the managerial stares on my back, waiting to see what kind of screw up I would prove to be. That’s when I realized what a shallow facade the idea of Geek Chic truly was. Oh sure, the geeks were enjoying a booming increase in stock because of the whole Internet thing, but behind the scenes, I knew what every other geek knew: it was geeks, nerds and dweebs, and never shall a set containing the intersection of the three be empty.
Yeah, there are exceptions: those rare combinations of beauty, brains and charisma, but face it, most of us are feeling socially well-adjusted when we spend the uncomfortable silences at parties staring at other people’s shoes. And even those exceptions have moments they’d like to forget. A teenage inclination to wearing pointy ears and throwing intergalactic gang signs, perhaps? An almost overwhelming self-identification with the character of Wilma Deering?
Just me, then? Well, no. I don’t have boobs. Or, at least, I shouldn’t.
My point is that geeks, dweebs and nerds all have a tendency to make absolute spectacles of themselves at the worst possible moments. I’m long past high school age, so there’s a valuable arena gone. Like others of my kind, I’ve chosen the Internet as the place vent my socially retarded spleen where, with any luck whatsoever, it will go largely unnoticed in the overall din of stupidity.
