I’ve never really considered myself a geek. I know too many people who have so much more technical knowledge than I do. I never did audio/video in school, never took a programming class, and never put together my own super computer entirely from scratch. I don’t own a PDA, a laptop, a cellphone, or an iPod, and though I drool over computer catalogs almost daily and work on various computers and operating systems both at work and at home, I have never actually bought my own computer; my salary has simply never been at that high geek level which allows all geeks to buy such luxurious toys.

No, I’ve never really considered myself a geek, which is why my money went to groceries and rent instead of to registration and travel costs to that geek event happening this weekend.

But when Human Encyclopedia’s computer started displaying symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, such that he had to get a brand-spanking new one from that techie Xanadu we call Fry’s, I got a really good look at my geek potential.

H.E. wanted to allow his two computers to talk, you know, so the old computer could bring the new one up to speed on all the work H.E. has to do—kind of like an on-the-job training with and tutelage under the employee being replaced—except that H.E. couldn’t figure out how to get the two talking.

“Hold on,” I told him. “I’ve got a spare hub and some ethernet cables. Let me go get them.” And I dug into my big box of goodies filled with power strips, broadband and cat-5 cables, power adapters, routers, and various other odds and ends for computers and networking, all the while explaining computer naming, file sharing and my assumptions on how Windows XP (which I’ve never actually worked on, being a Windows 98 and Mac OS 9 kind of girl) works.

“Whoa,” H.E. said as he gazed at all the gadgets I handed him, “you’re like a portable Fry’s. You’ve got everything!” What he said between those lines was: April, you’re a geek!

Now, I’m the sort of person who gives people the benefit of the doubt, and I doubt that H.E. meant any insult by it. I know for a fact that he didn’t mean to call me a geek in the sense of the first definition: a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake.

Um, yeah. For one thing, I’ve never worked at a carnival.

Still, it was kind of a revelation for me when H.E. said what he said. It made me think, Oh, maybe I am a geek! Heck, maybe I’ve been a geek all this time and just didn’t know it. Hmm.

Suddenly I feel like coding.

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