Reset Password
Reset Link Sent
| Blogs > mymemphisfantasy > Ramblings of a Madhatter |
Geek is Chic!
|
Geek is Chic! Growing up, you would have never made me believe that being a geek or a nerd was a good thing. There were so many people that were picked on, beat up, made fun of, simply because they learned faster, or were able to do math better, or read well above their grade level. Fast forward 20 years, and Geeks are now Chic! I can remember sitting down in grade school in front of my first computer (it was a floating unit, on a rolling cart, and would migrate between classes), and watching the rasterized graphics and 8-bit music of "The Oregon Trail" loading up on the screen and being absolutely fascinated by it. I wanted to know all I could about this amazing machine before me. When the game messed up and the that was sitting there at the time threw his hand up, and whined about it, I grabbed the manual and started reading. Back then there were certain command sets that had to be entered to make the game work, so I learned them, and made it work again. The teacher was just returning from finding the "Computer guy" to fix it, and saw it was working again. The told her I had fixed it, she praised me, the Computer Guy ruffled my hair and made some comment about me being to smart for my own good. All I did was read the manual, I explained, and then followed the instructions. He was impressed by this for some reason. Suddenly and without warning, I was a geek. This was not the Geek of today. This was the geek of then, that got called names, and picked on and beat up simply because I read a manual and was able to understand it. Still though as far back as I could remember, I always wanted to know how things worked. Christmas toys typically lasted about 2 weeks before getting disassembled and the parts used for other purposes. It was the same for computers. I wanted to learn about them. I wanted to know how they worked, And I wanted to figure out how to use them. Back then the only thing you would find in schools were Apple products, the most common one being the Apple IIse with green monochrome screens. It wasn't until several years later, that I would be exposed to the world of PC's. When I started High school, I wanted to join the computer club. Well turns out you have to be in a computer class to join computer club. I Was a freshman, and there were no computer classes available for freshmen. So I went to the<b> library </font></b>checked out every book I could find on computers (There was a Learning BASIC book, and a Couple tech manuals on DOS.) and began reading them. I sweet talked the computer teacher into letting me use the computers after school while she graded papers, to learn and practice on. This went on for a semester, before I was transferred to a different school. I was angry, I had a good setup going, and now I had to start over... grrr.. Little did I know this would be the event in my life where my life course would be set. Still though, being a geek in high school was not cool. It excluded me from the prominent social circles (Being in ROTC helped a little there though, I looked good in my dress blues lol, and uniform day was the one day a week that I never got messed with or picked on at all), I was stuck with the geek moniker and social circles (That was mostly useless, there is a reason there is a whole stereotype for geeks lol). My first day at my new school, I went to the computer teacher, and talked with her for a while. I told her about my setup at my last school. She was nice, and politely informed me that she could not do the same thing because she didn't stay after school to grade papers. I was disappointed, this was the early 90's and the only real place to use computers was the computer class (lab). So I went back to reading about them. The next year I signed up for my first computer class. By the end of the first six weeks, I was the teacher's aid, helping her to answer questions, and helping the other students keep up. The next year I had my second Computer class, and it was just a slightly more advanced version of the first year. So I did all my assignments the first week for the year, turned them in and pretty much did what I wanted the rest of the year, as long as I helped take some of the load off the teacher. My senior year I signed up for two different programming languages. QuickBASIC, and TurboPascal. I LOVED them. I knew the future was going to be driven by computers, and it gave me a little ego boost when I thought, hey if computers are controlling the world, I'm controlling the computers... I'm controlling the world!! *Pinky and the brain theme song playing in the background* Fast forward to college, where I discovered I enjoyed the hardware side of things even more than the programming side, and my path was chosen... These days, I look back and wish I could tell that , that the moment he picked up that manual and read it, he was going to be branded and picked on, beat up, ostracized, and generally made to feel pretty shitty about himself, but it would be worth it. The life that followed that would be something he got to enjoy and that one day, it would be cool to be a Geek, and sought after by many. that he was ahead of the curve, and to just ignore the idiots around him, one day, he would see them and realize, they are probably as unhappy in their job as he was happy in his chosen profession. Geek is Chic! |
Become a member to create a blog
