I was in denial for years, but during the last five years, I not only accepted being a geek, but also have embraced my geekiness. It was easy to deny being a geek in high school as I was listening to all kinds of music, smoking cigarettes, learning to play the guitar, and having a pretty good social life running around with my friends. Sure I took honors program classes, but a lot of kids in my class did. Sure I was in band, but just one year. I had dreams of becoming a rock star, and spent hours playing my guitar along with my Fleetwood Mac tapes, and later CD’s. However, deep down, there was a geek with aspirations of programming.

Computer Science was my second of three majors in college. I loved it. I would spend hours writing programs, then hours typing it in. (My best friend calls it hunting & pecking.) I can type, just not that well. After typing in and compiling, I would spend several more hours debugging, until I got my program running. I can remember excitingly telling my mom, in painstaking detail, about the steps I took to get a program running, then finally noticing that blank look from her telling me she had no idea what I was talking about and didn’t care to learn, but would sit there and listen to me anyway. Alas, I eventually had to take assembly language and never “got it.”

I spent the better part of last week figuring out how to disassemble our old Compaq Presuckio, oh I mean Presario, just to replace the failing cdrom drive. Reason being, it was still a good machine for the kids to play games on. After replacing the cdrom, I discovered that the hard drive was hosed, and the proprietary POS wouldn’t accept a cdrom not made by Compaq. Hence, it is now fully disassembled for spare parts, although I think the floppy drive is the only thing salvageable.

I am also a Trekkie. When I was at Tinker I put together several Star Trek models. I had 3 Enterprise models: 1701, 1701A, and 1701D. I had a Klingon Bird of Prey, a Romulan Warbird, a Ferengi Marauder, Voyager, and the Deep Space Nine space station. I kept them at work on top of my hutch, and was amazed at the people who would ask whose Star Trek models those were. I would think to myself “Duh, they’re on my desk…” but generally it’s not a good idea as a SrA to say that out loud to a Lt or Capt. I nearly got into gaming while at the JAC, but always managed to not progress beyond computer gaming. I do see the day in the next few years when my husband and I will be playing D&D with our kids. They would already be playing Neverwinter Nights if their video card could handle it.