Geek love
17 June 2004 @ lunch time | Comments (0)
Just call me Chuck Woolery. I’m not really sure what prompted this train of thought, other than the realization that my email trail will be quite long by the time I reach retirement age.
I was invited a short while ago to use Gmail and while pondering the world of I’m-so-clever-look-at-how-witty-I-can-be usernames, it occurred to me that I’ve used quite a few aliases during the length of my net presence, and at least one email address corresponding to each alias. It would probably necessitate my sitting down and manually writing out all the email accounts I’ve ever actively used in order to determine just how many I’ve had.
Immediately reminded of the only other quantity requiring this method of arithmetic (total lifetime sexual partners), I became aware of the two figures’ potential relationship.
Example:
Tron McUnixson is a geek. He likes his casemods liquid-cooled, his SlashDot XML feed delivered steaming hot, and his hamster dance served somewhere around peanut butter jelly time. Tron has burned through email addresses with reckless abandon, using aliases such as w00tw00t, gandalf_the_great, and ghIlghameS.
In fact, Mr. McUnixson has actively used a total of 32 email addresses throughout the course of his life. Compare that with his 4 sexual partners, you’ve got an even 8:1 geek love ratio. Pretty geek chic.
Conversely, if you take into account that most non-techie individuals can survive exclusively with only one or two email addresses in their lifetime, you can bet they’d have a pretty hefty ratio pointing in the opposite direction. 1:10 or 1:20 wouldn’t be out of the question for most individuals. Definitely NOT geek.
Keep in mind however, you can’t just count email addresses that you may own but do not use; they’ve got to be email addresses you’ve actively used at some point in your life.
Definitely this rule cannot be applied to all individuals. Those members of the geek multitudes without a certain propensity toward dabbling in minor sins are definitely exempt from this equation. You’ve also got to give a little margin of error toward our senior geeks who have to work very hard obtaining free hotmail accounts in order to overcome a lifetime of debauchery so that their geek love ratio can be truly representative of their geek status. But I’ve found that as a measure of the average sinner between the ages of 20 and 50, it can be a pretty accurate measure of their geekitude.
Personally, I sit pretty close to a well-balanced 1:1 ratio and I’ve found (via an informal survey of my friends) on average that’s pretty close to the geek threshold. We’ll keep the actual figures used for that equation private ;-)