Geek Defense
Defending Your Fellow Geek
Somewhere north of Columbia I was low on petrol and vitamin-Twizzler. As I turned into the gas station it was obvious that things had gone wrong. A crowd stood around one of the pumps with their hands on their hips or folded across their chests as one of the gas station attendants came from behind the building with a heavy, white bucket-o-something.
The clear liquid spread across the concrete wasn’t water—crowds don’t gather for water anymore. I won’t keep you in suspense: it was diesel fuel. Some schmuck had decided to leave the pump unattended—in spite of the many posted warnings about such things—and now there was so much diesel on the ground I thought Michael Bay was filming Transformers 7: Another Damned Paycheck.
(For the record: when standing in the midst of this great quantities of flammable liquid one begins to wonder certain things: Can cell phones really ignite vapor? Can a static discharge ignite vapor? Can a ’98 Honda Accord with a bad paint job and a dented front hood ignite vapor? …Okay, that one is pretty specific to me…but it’s my website. So there.)
I was confident that I’d prayed to the god of Traveling Geeks and I knew that the industrial strength kitty litter the gas station attendant was spreading around would, very soon, turn the spill into nothing more than crunchy gray pebbles.
(Chemistry is awesome.)
So I went into the store and scavenged for my fistful of Twizzlers and bottle of sugary electrolytes. A small group was gathered at the front by the checkout counter. From their conversation, somehow, all of them worked there.
“He should have done something about it?” a rather burly, dentally-impaired woman said.
“Damn right,” a dark-skinned man in coveralls said.
“Well I told him to do something,” the young girl at the register said. All of them were gazing through the dirty plate glass, watching the other attendant dump kitty litter over the spill and puff gently on a cigarette. (Apparently he was certain he’d prayed to very forgiving and inflammable gods.)
Now, I’m a patient guy, and I understand it’s not every day several gallons of diesel fuel threatens to ignite fuel pumps, so I waited patiently as the group went on, at length, about what had transpired: some guy overflowed his tank, jumped in his car, drove off, left the nozzle spraying all over everything.
Why? Only Brawndo knows.
But there was an odd sense of ease among this group. And I soon found out it was due to the declarations of the dentally-impaired woman who had convinced everyone that diesel fuel was, in fact, non-flammable.
One thing I’ve learned as a geek is that logic is a luxury, not a naturally occurring state.
Still, I was fully prepared to let this bit of…shall we say “bad thinking” pass me by. You probably can’t tell it from reading this, but I’m really not arrogant. I’m the first to admit that not the smartest patient in the asylum, but I do consider myself a little sharper than those who haven’t yet figured out that every Wednesday is apple sauce day. (If I lost you with that metaphor, I apologize. It got away from me, but I still dig it.)
But then, just as I had written them all off, there came a voice of logic and reason, a voice of Geek: “It’s not that diesel isn’t flammable,” the voice said tentatively, “it’s just that it’s got a higher ignition temperature.”
It was the young girl at the register. She was a geek.
The dentally-impaired woman rolled her eyes. “Here goes Miss Know-It-All,” she said.
The dark-skinned man in the coveralls said nothing, seeming a little unsure as to which camp he wanted to join. It was obvious that this particular geek had a history with the dentally-impaired woman.
In short, this was a Geek power play.
We’ve all been there. We hear a conversation swirling around us. It is a conversation full of misinformation and bad science. A conversation of speculation and outright guesses. And it makes our Geek skin crawl. Nothing gets under a Geek’s skin like watching misinformation circulate freely among the masses.
I had no idea who any of these people were. I knew painfully little about the dynamics of their day-to-day relationships. I could gleam who was the boss, who was the lifer and who was the temp. And I knew I’d never see any of them again. I could have been just fine getting my Twizzlers, my sugary electrolytes and heading back to the highway, singing “Eye of the Tiger” as I barreled down the interstate.
But no.
So, much like my encounter with the comic book geek at the reading, I tossed my fellow geek a lifeline: “What’s an ignition point?” I asked, smiling sheepishly.
Then there was a little twinkle in my fellow geek’s eye. She began with “I’m an Applied Science major and…”
The rest is history.
So why does this little anecdote matter? Isn’t this just a rehashing of my earlier post “She Geeked All Over Me?”
Yes and no.
Where my previous post was about giving our fellow geeks the right to be themselves, I like to believe that my encounter at the South Carolina gas station was about helping my fellow geek establish dominance among a pack of ravenous non-geeks. Even if it was only for a moment, that geek shined. She showed those people—people she worked with day in and day out—that she was a wealth of knowledge, that she knew things, intricate and complex things. She showed them that, even if they could not see it, she possessed a very definite worth. It was obvious that she’d shown them all this before but, now, here was a stranger seeking her council, an unbiased third-party bowing low and solemnly at the altar of her Geek.
What it really that big of a deal though?
Perhaps, after my leaving, her coworkers looked at her a little differently. Perhaps not. I have no misconceptions about my small episode at that gas station. My actions did not set into motion any great chain of events that will somehow change the world.
I have not begun Skynet…sadly.
But maybe I made a geek feel good. Maybe I made her feel a little better about being a geek in a world where that is not always perceived as a good thing. Maybe I made her feel a little less alone.
Maybe I just helped.
Maybe that’s enough.
End Transmission.
More Modern Geek:
Let’s Make A Geek
She Geeked All Over Me
The 1100 Tenets of Geek
The Modern Geek’s Manifesto
6 Responses to “Geek Defense”
Follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
In my own experience, it’s the people that speak most loudly that get heard. Not the people that speak sense, even when given the opportunity to do so.
I couldn’t agree more. My hope is that those who make sense begin to speak more loudly, and that those of us who know that the soft-spoken one is correct will speak begin speaking up for them.
Sometimes the solution is to have the soft-spoken sensible person telling the loud and charismatic one what to say — or so I hear it works in certain non-geek company. I just tend to blast my opposition in a matter-of-fact manner if it matters and keep it to myself if it doesn’t. No argument required.
Very good points. I’m a fan of the “Spokesperson” method as well. I dig that type of teamwork. 🙂
Blasting opposition is all well and good, but after a very short time it becomes background noise unless you’re invested in it. Creating opportunities to speak, as J has suggested here,is a great idea, but it doesn’t mean one gets heard. But I guess the way J phrased it, it’s all about giving one confidence to speak rather than assuring they are heard. And I guess, that’s a pretty important step towards being heard.
I dunno. I can’t stop thinking about kairos.
I know if that had been the geek girl in that story, it would have felt really good to have a little validation, no matter what other changes did or did not occur with my coworkers.