I’m a fledgling geek in a world full of supergeeks.
It can be a bit overwhelming. The high-powered techies around me sometimes reassure me that, despite my feeling of becoming more ignorant every day, I am actually making progress. But the only people I have to compare myself to are the ubergeeks, the kind of people who know how to program a Cisco router, or can hack into hex code to retrieve a corrupted file. And here I am, tickled pink because I figured out how to rename a DOS volume all by myself. (Somehow they get named with lowercase letters, and then you can’t delete them because fdisk doesn’t do lowercase letters—so you have to rename them with allcaps.)
It doesn’t help my sense of inferiority when I go and ask for assistance with something and get an answer I could have reached myself.
“I need to install Project on this laptop, but it doesn’t have a CD-ROM drive.”
“You’ll need to put the Project disk in your computer, then share your CD-ROM drive to the network and install it from there.”
And the infuriating thing is, I should have known that. Even a newbie geek like me knows how to share a damn drive on the network. It’s just that after an hour or two of flailing about with issues I can’t figure out on my own, I forget that there are some things within my limited technical grasp. I spend forty-five minutes banging my head over why a network card doesn’t want to speak TCP/IP, and then think I’ll save time on the next insurmountable problem by just asking a smarter geek right off the bat. I imagine the real geeks in the pack are shaking their heads and wondering when I’ll stop chasing my tail.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.