Welcome to my blog. You'll see soon that us penguins lead very interesting lives. Enjoy!

The clock continues to tick. Beads of sweat appear on Ardant's forehead. A dead silence pervades the room; all eyes are watching him. Time is running out. Ardant begins to fret. He wipes his brow with the sleeve of his shirt. His team members stand behind him and anxiously wait.

Ardant begins to speak.

"I'll have the .. uhh.. hmm... bacon cheeseburger, please."

As always, Ardant's indecisive. Especially at Burger King, and especially today, the day of the big regionals programming competition. We've travelled far, very far, all the way to Oakville for this.

And I've followed them.

Not because I'm a geek, and definitely not because I know how to program. Because I don't. I'm not here to program. Nor am I here to learn how to program. That's Ardant's job. I'm on the geek hunt -- I've come in search for the essence of a geek. What makes a geek a geek? What makes him or her tick?

SO the geek hunt begins. Burger King dinner in hand, Ardant and his team approach the campus, where the regionals are held. It's now time to play 'spot the geek'. I squint my eyes in anticipation, scanning the room for person who expemplify 'the geek'.

I spot a young man, slightly skinny, sporting glasses and a leather jacket that reads "Laurier" on the back. "There," I say, "got one!". "No way," says Ardant, and he's right. I've made the wrongful assumption that anyone who looks like a geek is a geek. There's much more than that. It's the love for something, the desire to learn, to excel, to ability to appreciate that thing when it's done to its best. Something original, something cute (like me!), something incredibly different and fun. That's what being a geek is about. Not how someone looks, or what they do, or what they love to do.

Everyone has a little piece of geek inside of them. Most people are just too afraid to admit it and pursue their dreams. Don't judge someone by their looks, because it's not really them.

But the geek hunt returns in earnest. "Hey, look at that U of T [Ed note: Toronto] team over there. See that one wearing the overly short pants, and the super-thick glasses. And the one with the plaid shirt. Oh, and that guy with the FreeBSD t-shirt. Now -those- are geeks." I can only nod my head and agree.

Then I spot someone new, next to the U of T team. "How about that one standing right behind them, the short, skinny, one, with the super-thick glasses, short pants, wearing a dress-shirt with suspenders, non-matching socks, and badly parted hair?" I jump up and down and flap my flipper wildly at this new discovery.

"Uhh, Pengie, that's their coach."

[ March 12th 2002 23:24 | 0 responses | Add Comments ]