You Know You’re a Geek When…

  • You look at a movie trailer and think, “I have that font.”
  • You know you are a geek when you set up an automatic rerouting of your email to your pager.
  • You are a geek when you get sudden attacks of bittersweet nostalgic feelings when thinking about your long-lost old Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX-81, TRS-80 (or whatever hardware you were raised on), and use large amounts of money/time trying to track one down.
  • You are wearing ten year old spectacles, made of steel.
  • You realize you never cook, eating only take-away pizza.
  • You check your web access-page more than once a day.
  • You seriously consider devoting a web page to your computer. (Not the brand, mind you, but the actual computer itself)
  • You have more email addresses than you do pairs of shoes.
  • You get depressed when you get less than 10 email messages a day.
  • You already know what you want to write both Master’s papers and your dissertation about, and you just graduated from College.
  • You can discuss the philosophical and physical differences among the Tangos.
  • Although vaguely insulted by pocket-protector jokes, you still find them funny.
  • You plan to get two Masters degrees.
  • You start getting paranoid you aren’t getting all your e-mail. (If you have sent me email, and there seems to be no life from me, try again.)
  • Someone asks you what languages you know, and you reply Upper Slavic, French, Esperanto and C.
  • You are on the Obscure Software and Computer Crap Junk Mailing Lists.
  • You can explain how AppleTalk Networks work.
  • Sleep and nightime are no longer irrevocably linked.
  • You arrange to get email access no matter where you go.
  • WAIS is your life.
  • You walk past a Con and people know who you are.
  • You have a definite philosphy of stacking wood for fires.
  • You hear the word “Scuzzy” and the first thing you think of is not an adjective.
  • You went to a high school where the only team with a winning record was the Chess team.
  • You rig up elaborate mechanisms to do really basic tasks.
  • You know about USENET cultures in groups you don’t even read.
  • You put your pathfinder on the web.
  • You get REALLY excited when people from countries with limited access to the ‘net are frequent visitors to your pages.
  • You don’t hand in final papers unless they’ve been formatted on a desktop publishing program.
  • You write web pages about your web pages.
  • Your favorite part of Geometry was proving theorems.
  • You’ve ever contemplated collecting graters.
  • You can remember your web address faster than your phone number.
  • You’ll spend a long time customizing a computer you’ll use for one day to the absolute pinacle of comfort, but you won’t bother to spend two hours sewing up a skirt, and wear the damn thing sarong style.
  • You do your best work after 11 p.m.
  • You work in a building where you need a badge to move between floors.
  • You calculate the odds of getting one of the primo parking spaces in relation to your apartment, factoring in time, weather, season, etc, and are accurate over 80% of the time.
  • You can count the number of moderately good hacker/computer dude type films on one hand. (I promised not to froth at the mouth when I went to go see The Net — I failed miserably.)
  • You’ve bought one of those license plate holders on which you can have your URL or email address embossed.
  • You head straight past People and the always entertaining Weekly World News for this month’s Computer Shopper.
  • You can track the geek gene through your family tree.
  • You froth at the mouth when someone talks about the “Information Superhighway.”
  • You are a member of the USENET elite, invoked in posts in threads to which you have not posted.
  • You can sing Tom Lehrer’s element song.
  • Not only is your computer in the centre of your room, it’s set up so as allow ‘netting from your couch, as well as your desk chair.
  • You arrange your jobs so you can telecommute.
  • You organise your CDs, so the tops all face upward, alphabetically, or by record label (If you do more than one of these, you are an Anal-Retentive Geek).
  • You spend a lot of time figuring out which of 100 adult goldfish are the most fertile, have the strongest genes, and combined to produce tiny little goldfish.
  • You carry an 32 gig flash drive to and from work.
  • You can sing “Smooth Rider” from Grease 2. If you do the hand movements while singing, you should get out more.
  • You plot to get your grandmother on Email.
  • You’ve ever contemplated devoting a web page to World News Now.