RTFM
Anyone who might be baited into anticipation already knows I’m Planning Something (Relatively) Big. For anyone else who stumbles here on their way to…well, it’s a dead end, so I’m not sure who you people are. But you clicked something and weren’t smart enough to go where you wanted to, so I’m going to taunt you, mkay?
That’s not the point of this, but the preamble. I don’t feel it’s appropriate to labor here, at this time, for a variety of reasons. Yet, if the Something Big I’m Planning is to maintain or gather any audience, I have to throw you people morsels from time to time. So, here we are.
Too often, an inopportune or wholly inaccurate apprehension of what makes geeks or nerds geeks or nerds blossoms into real interpersonal strife. We must currently sit at a confluence of technophilic forces, as two separate essayists have compiled complementary pieces that, together, should give you either a knowing chuckle or a gasp of enlightenment.
Via Rands in Repose comes The Nerd Handbook, which decompiles the esoteric behavior of nerds for sympathetic partners.
Nerds are fucking funny. Your nerd spent a lot of his younger life being an outcast because of his strange affinity with the computer. This created a basic bitterness in his psyche that is the foundation for his humor. Now, combine this basic distrust of everything with your nerd’s other natural talents and you’ll realize that he sees humor is another game.
Greg Knauss posits a theory explaining why programmers—and I think this might work well for anyone with similar technical interests—don’t make good managers, and vice versa. “Managers must work shallow and wide, while programmers must work narrow and deep,” he says. Further, “People who are naturally tuned to one particular method of work will not only enjoy their jobs a lot more, but be better at them.”
I won’t bother paraphrasing or quoting anymore. I do, however, think that these curiously-timed posts gather quite a bit of germane material and together they might make it easier for those of you who, despite your frustrations, like to spend time with people like this. You know who you are.
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