Geeks Rule!
That’s right. Flash back to the very midpoint of the 1990s — 1995: the year that saw the introduction of Internet Explorer, Java, Deep Blue, eBay and the internet’s first Wiki. The year that saw the birth of Yahoo.com. The year Apple first licensed its Mac operating system, and the year that IBM introduced the butterfly keyboard.
That year was this guy’s heyday. A time when Geeks truly ruled! A time when every other one of us that didn’t happen to be a Geek needed to call regularly upon one or more members of the nearest Geek platoon to help us sort out our cable connections, our reboots and clean starts, our upgrades and debugs. If you were at all observant, you’d see guys like this every day and everywhere, traipsing through airports, disgorging from taxis and crossing corporate lobbies, trailing all the arcane paraphernalia of their Geekitude — the rolling carts, the black and white and gray boxes, the ratty jeans and broken down sneakers, the tee-shirts with jokey slogans we uninitiated never understood — all in service to the uninformed masses struggling to make their bigger-than-a-breadbox Macs and PCs perform appropriately.
But now, you say, it is 2011. The year of iPad 2, i-this and i-that. Our latest technological devices no longer need cabling or connectors — they are all wireless! Gone are the rolling carts and the sweated brows — now everything fits in a shirt pocket or a man-purse! Forget the butterfly keyboard! In fact, forget the keyboard entirely! Just use your thumbs to tap out a tweet, or simply smudge your pinched fingers across an interactive screen to edit a video! Freedom, freedom at last! We are no longer held hostage by the Geek squad or that rambunctious and recalcitrant gang of twenty-somethings down in IT!
Wait. Hang on just a moment more. For it turns out that gang of twenty-somethings is no longer down in IT. Seems they have just broken into the ranks of the world’s newest billionaires, and are now acquiring the company we had hoped to retire from in relative comfort. Their compadres are formulating the hard- and software that will fly next year’s jets, apportion next year’s electrical grid capacity, channel next year’s cellular phone traffic, distribute next year’s movie and music downloads, publish next year’s new media, and determine next year’s hottest hits and deadest duds in fashion, art and architecture.
Crap. Geeks still rule.
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