I’m beginning to understand more and more why… well, why I’m not understood. I may be so bold as to include all geeks in here, and I’ll use that wording, but I am not going to try to speak for anyone but myself (though I do think that it’s true…).
People don’t seem to understand us at all. How we work, how we function, what we feed off of. Why can’t people just get that as a geek I enjoy work. Not work as in stuff that sucks, but….
I think that’s it.
To “normal” people, work is what they do when they go to the office at 8am, and don’t do at 5pm when they get home. A dentist or doctor doesn’t bring his stuff home with him, and an iron worker or miner I’m guessing don’t bring their work home. Geeks on the other hand, go to work and hack/code/tweak/modify/play, then come home, and continue on with the same type of thing. It’s because the geek culture is one where we have the unique ability to have a job where they pay us to do the things we do anyway. Not exactly the same… I took a sick day today and spent the majority of it playing Deus Ex [archive.org link]. Same actions though, sitting in front of the computer and doing, experimenting, fixing, breaking, taking apart and examining. Now it’s 11pm and what am I doing? Sitting in front of my code from work and tracking down a bad-ass segfault in init_attacks(). Experiment, break, examine farther. Sound familiar?
So because I enjoy “work”. Like I said, not work that sucks, but work that is fun. And strange as it sounds to the outside world and normal people, tracking down segfaults is fun. I’d explain more, but I have to fall back to an old adage from a climbing book: “The resons, whenever stated, never sound quite right, and only matter to nonclimbers anyway.”. Turn that “nonclimbers” to “non-geeks” and you’ve got it.
Anyway, all I want to know is why can’t people understand that my idea of a “fun day” may consist of sitting and coding be it for work or one of my own personal projects. Sometimes I have no problem being alone. Hell, I enjoy it a lot of times, and wish I had less face time… just a weekend with no people, calls or human interaction. Let my batteries recharge or something. I guess some people work the opposite, they can’t stand being alone and need to “recharge” by being around people. I guess everyone is wired differently.