I never thought of myself as a geek. the truth is, I never thought much about what the term “geek” really meant, other than it didn’t really apply to me, or so I thought.
It was really only recently, after years of being what I now realize is a “geek.” I am an unusual breed, and this too is a surprise. I have worked as a technical writer for many years now, and writing has been my stock and trade. My living, my life. All kinds of writing and editing, from the technical to the translated, to the translated technical, I have written and edited in some form my whole life.
As the years slipped by, I realized that the higher up the chain of command I moved, and the more technical my work became, the more solitary my work and thus, my life, were. I found that while I worked in teams, the team per se tended to be a cluster of like-minded individuals who would occasionally meet and then work in a dark office with multiple computers where each of us would write our respective piece of code, or in my case, language which I would sometimes also code.
Our code was our life. We had long discussion about “elegant” code versus “clunky” code. We had debates amongst ourselves whose code was more elegant in our group, which I often said was mine, bien sur, because it was the most simple and because I was not a programmer, per se, I was a writer who also happened to know enough code to be of a double benefit to the company where we worked. Plus, as time went on, I learned more code – partially out of necessity and partially out of curiosity. I had a craving, a real addiction - I have to tell you - to building my own things online.
I wanted to build elegant Web sites. I wanted to fix areas of our site that were not as I wanted. More than simply writing, which I also did, I wanted to orchestrate the whole thing. I wanted to hold meetings about Flash scripts and the voice over and the content features. I even came up with a mathematical method for creating content which I labeled a content equation, which listed the different variables that each diagrammed area of the page should have. For example, the header would take a part of column A combined with column C for example to create content feature 1. This all made sense as long as you had the giant spread sheet that I created to go with it and it made perfect sense if you were, I realized, a geek.
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