Am I A Nerd?

I'm never really sure if I qualify as a techie person. I don't have a zillion computer manuals at home, I have a Mac but haven't been drawn to the rocks of the Unix command line (oh goody, I can practice my awk!) nor started to learn Ruby. On the other hand, my recent reading has included Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature, Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class, Ashley Kahn's The House That Trane Built and I'm currently three-quarters through William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience, plus I'm still working my way through Hartshorne's Algebraic Geometry and I check in with Daily Dose of Excel every day. I think that makes up for not getting down and dirty with Xcode yet. There's more to being a nerd than programming.

Anyway, there are two wonderful essays about techie types. Peter Seebach's Care and Feeding of Your Hacker and Michael Lopp's (aka Rands) The Nerd Handbook. Both are well worth a read. Rands has a terrific line about the Nerd's “annoyingly efficient relevancy engine”: “your nerd’s insatiable quest for information and The High has tweaked his brain in an interesting way. For any given piece of incoming information, your nerd is making a lightning fast assessment: relevant or not relevant? Relevance means that the incoming information fits into the system of things your nerd currently cares about. Expect active involvement from your nerd when you trip the relevance flag. If you trip the irrelevance flag, look for verbal punctuation announcing his judgment of irrelevance. It’s the word your nerd says when he’s not listening and it’s always the same. My word is “Cool”, and when you hear “Cool”, I’m not listening.”

Of course, you understand, that's not me. I do not sit in meetings doodling over a problem while monitoring the blah-blah (excuse me, I mean, insightful discussion) for anything remotely connected with me or my job. I do not scan the conversations around me in cafes for anything cute, silly, interesting or memorably pretentious. I don't have problems keeping focussed on what someone is saying if I'm not interested – of course not. Nor do I take one look at a woman and decide a) what it is about her I find sexy and attractive, b) if I would sleep with her if I had the chance, c) if I have a remote chance, and if the answer to a) is “Nothing” or to b) or c) “No” then she vanishes from my world like a passing bus. I'm not that shallow. I'm looking for People Like Me (aren't we all looking for People Like Us?) and given how specific a description that is, my relevancy engine has a default setting of “Off”.

By the way, if you think this is a bad habit of nerds, you haven't been brushed off by a really top-notch networker at an industry event: those guys can be halfway to their next target before they've stopped shaking your hand because they realised you are way too low on the corporate tree to be useful to them. Watch Four Weddings and a Funeral and see the way Corin Redgrave seems to shake Hugh Grant's hand affably while utterly ignoring him (it's in wedding two).

What's interesting to me right now about this is the identity: am I really a Nerd? And if I am, how do I get to be a better Nerd? Because I've spent a lot of my life avoiding certain nerdhood things. For instance, Star Trek and general Trekiness no, Battlestar Galactica yes; tee-shirts with words on them, no, shirts from Jermyn St, yes. There is room here for the idea of a “gentleman nerd” and I'm going to elbow me some out.