People make jokes all the time about geeks (in my case, computer geek) being anti-social and alone. Hell, we even make the same jokes. Imagery of bloated individuals huddled over a keyboard in a dark basement, eating microwave junk food and drinking highly caffeinated beverages. Admittedly, there are a couple out there. But not as many as you think.
The reality is that there is a wide spectrum of geeks out there. Just walking through the office where I work could show this. And we are social. I have a lot of friends from all over the place. That I have actually met in person and talked to…with my voice…without the aid of an internet messaging device.
But here is the real reasons that some of us are single (at least for long stretches at a time).
1. We have to spend a lot of time behind a keyboard.
This is no joke. We really need to spend a lot of time on the computer. All these efficiency tools that you see coming out? Yeah, that’s for us. We have a lot to do and we have a lot going on at any given time. Currently I spend 8 hours a day at work on the computer, then I spend another 2 to 4 hours at home on the computer. As for the weekends, yeah. I try to squeeze in other activities between the time I need to be working.
What am I (and a lot of us doing out there) doing? Solving problems. A lot of them. These things don’t come together on their own. It’s not read a book or read a website and boom, technology is born. A lot of the tech that you see comes from guys like me, pounding the square peg into the round hole.
2. Language barriers
Note that previously I said “guys like me”? That’s because we work in an environment that is almost all guys. Don’t get the wrong idea, it’s not like an exclusive boys club. We want (desperately want) more women in tech. We are so very willing to promote, educate, tutor, mentor, whatever it takes to get more women into our community.
Why?
So someone we talk to knows what the hell we are talking about!
We joke a lot at work about the fact that we can’t really tell people what we do for a living. Not because it is super secret spy stuff ( “I would tell you but I have to kill you”). No, it’s because if we did we get the blank stare or the “I don’t know what that means”.
If you are a doctor, banker, lawyer even a plumber, people get that and can relate. I tell them I am a Systems Administrator and they just give me the “oh, that’s nice.” So most of us has resigned ourselves to “I work with computers”. Which is the equivalent of a Doctor or lawyer saying “I work with people”.
Even if we do find someone and are on a date, (or as crazy as it sounds, in a relationship) they can’t ask us how was work. If we did describe how our day went and we might as well have been talking latin.
Ladies, we’re not kidding, come join us. We have cookies! …and cake!
(the cake is a lie)
3. The internet is a scary place
Trust me, as a person who has been on a few dates through online services, the person on the other side of the screen is scary. And the admission process is absolutely ridiculous. As a guy, and a decent person, you are competing with a flood of complete douche bags that only know enough about computers to take selfies of their junk and “hook up” with as many unsuspecting women as they can. Meanwhile, the other side of this is women that set up a virtual obstacle course to go on at least one date with them. Only to show up and find out why they circumbed to online dating in the first place.
As Grumpy Cat would say…No!
4. Stress Relief
We in the geek community also get a lot of bad rap from what we do to relieve stress. Nobody can sit and dwell on a problem for hours upon hours a day. It would drive someone bat shit insane and moreover they wouldn’t get very far. A lot of the solutions to my problems come from walking away from the problem and doing something else for a bit. (Cleaning house has an odd success rate for me with this). The point being we have to get away from the problem we are working on for awhile. As we are already sitting at a computer, it is usually computer gaming. Some of us will resort to console gaming or TV/Movie watching. Some people even do board games with friends. But we take a lot of flack for the gaming. All of us (tech savvy and not so tech savvy) play games. We just seem to take flack for it. As for the D&D, Fantasy, SciFi, Renaissance stuff – when we are getting completely frustrated with the stuff we are working on, we want to channel that energy somewhere. At least we aren’t randomly punching people in the street, vandalising property or picking fights in bars. And yeah, some of us are not big tough guys (typing is not much of a workout) but probably not a great idea to mess with us anyway. There’s 5 times more rage packed into us and we are dangerous in a herd.
5. That square peg again…
Just for fun over the past weeks or so, I have made minor posts on a particular social media site to make sure it wasn’t just my tunneled perception of things to say people don’t understand what we are doing. Within the geek community, these are not epic concepts to understand. In fact, some of the people that I am friends with and work with, would almost wonder why I am posting the problems. They are kind of a non-issue or something we fix while working on other things.
For those who are curious, here is a synopsis of what I am working on:
I am trying to create a “proof of concept” where an SDN controller can be used in a virtual environment to provide networking control to a customer on a legacy hardware architecture. To do this, I need to set up a bunch of virtual servers on a few parent servers that are also connected to dedicated servers on a single vlan. I have to set up something to create network traffic and load on the virtual and dedicated servers to be able to observe the traffic and process load on all. I also have to set up a monitoring environment to be able to observe this in real time and log any issues that may arise for troubleshooting to help me isolate the issue.
To do this, I have to set up (minimally) 2 parent servers with 3 child servers on each. A backup server, a monitoring server, a fully managed switch, multiple physical network connections plus with using my public servers, create internet connections with them as well.
So all these have to have working mail software for reporting, monitoring agents, and backup schemes. To create the load, I am creating an application that interacts with a Cassandra cluster. I am going to use the Floodlight SDN controller for testing. I am using Zabbix for monitoring. I am also setting up haproxy for talking to the cluster and working on a backup scheme using bacula and/or custom scripted backup setup. All the hardware will have to have openvswitch running on it so that the SDN controller can see it and set up the connections.
Keep in mind that half this stuff I only have a working knowledge of. Some of it I don’t even have that. This is also a set up that not very many people know about or even have done. But if I can make it work, it could make a significant improvement in how we set up customer and infrastructure environments.
I am also going to look into the aspect of using containerization with this as well once the initial proof of concept is completed.
Also, keep in mind that this is all being done on my own personal hardware on my off time. This is not sanctioned by where I work (yet, hopefully someday though!). So I have to put in my own money on it and a lot of my personal time.
As some of those who are reading this may see, not a whole lot of this makes sense to most people. I would not be surprised if some of the people that I work with thinking that I am a little off my rocker for even messing around with this. But I am doing it for the good of me, the good of the company, and maybe even the good of the internet.
But just posting small snippets of what I am working on or the problems I am working on can just lose people. For example:
Post – 9:00 AM and first problem solved of the day. Hopefully the outlook for the rest of the day is as good.
responses –
“So did the cats hide your coffee?”
“no, I have learned not to post the actual problem because it just confuses people. LOL
But the particular problem was that my virtual servers were kernel panicing after a kernel update. Found that the update didn’t make the initrd and add it to the grub menu.
See what I mean?”
“Sooo, your popcorn was having an anxiety attack. Good to know”
<post by me of a link to wikipedia about kernel panic>
“Annnnd, I’m still smiling politely because I have no idea what’s going on. But now I’m hungry from thinking about kernels and menus. ”
and
“Kernal Panic…sounds like a super villain.”
This is how they would normally go down. Keep in mind that I wasn’t looking for help or answers. I completely understand that social networks are terrible for this. This is why we all go to forums for stuff we actually need help with.
But back to my main point. It’s stuff like this that ties myself and others that are out there to a computer for long periods of time. We are not being anti-social, we just have a lot to do.
And, as stated before, there are a lot of different types and personalities of geekdom. Sometimes walking around the office, there are people that you would not believe are hardcore geeks by looking at them. Seriously, we are not all wearing internet meme t-shirts, glued to our smartphone, talking about regular expressions. There are bikers, hippies, hipsters, business types, weight lifters, farmers, socialites, activists, and everything else.
We are social, we are among you. We are the real geeks
Ultimately, my point is, we are single not because we are not incapable of being social. Many of us are single because we have a lot to do, what we do most people don’t understand and aren’t anywhere where we are when we do get away for awhile to relax.
But enough about this, I need to get back to work.