Sociable Geek

As far as geeks are concerned, I am possibly a very sociable one. Since I was young, I have never had problems talking to people of all ages. I could even get on a bus, have a conversation with the person sitting next to me, and then get off the bus without ever knowing his/her name. This being said, I am still a geek and am fairly socially inept. This is possibly a minor predicament for me because people tend to forget that I am a geek who would rather talk to computers than humans.

Even before I had a computer, I had plenty of other things to occupy myself with. As a child, I dreamed a lot. My grandmother used to say that it was real easy to keep me busy as all she had to do was give me a pencil and a blank sheet of paper. While I was growing up, there were so many books to read. I ended up spending a small fortune on books. I can still remember a time when paperbacks were sold for about RM8 but they often cost RM40 these days.

The books that occupied my time the most when I was in primary school were encyclopedias and such. I used to call them “knowledge books”. I would usually start by devouring the science and technology section followed by history and geography before hitting boring stuff like politics. At that time, I had an encyclopedic knowledge of all sorts of random stuff and I was not shy to let people know that I know stuff. You cannot possibly get more socially inept than that.

When I was in secondary school, the reading habits changed considerably. I began reading fantasy fiction. Before this, I had no idea that books could make me cry. As a consequence of this fantasy pursuit, I ended up in the make belief world of Role-Playing Games (RPGs). These were games where we played characters and went about exploring, dungeon crawling and killing monsters on a piece of paper. You can hardly find a geekier social activity than that.

In the world of RPGs, all interactions were governed by rules. An element of chance is usually introduced by the throw of a die. All kinds of dice were used from 4 to 20 sided ones. However, everything was governed by rules. Since I liked to talk, I usually ended up being the Game Master (GM) whose job was to make sure the story flowed and the rules were followed. Children build their social skills through gaming and I just ended up with a different set of them.

Computers entered my life when I was very young. I started self learning programming at the age of 9 and by the time I was 12 I was writing viruses, network multi-player games, and graphical applications. Then, I got onto the Internet and that was the end of it. You couldn’t pry me away from my computer for any reason whatsoever. That was the beginning of the end. I ended up being a total geek and was absolutely proud of it.

As a result, I am a sociable socially inept geek. I can talk your ears off, but I am just as likely to offend you along the way.

Taking a line from a new book I just read: whatever my faults are, they are social, not moral.