"Are you trying to make a geek out of me?"
That's my girlfriend. The question was asked with a bit of humour but also with a bit of alarm. We were watching Ghost in the Shell, an animated series in which characters have cybernetically-enhanced brains, which unfortunately like most computers, can be hacked. It's old hat for me, new stuff for her.
But the bottom line is that she crossed the geek-line long ago. This is a woman who isn't happy that I have the faster video card. She's the one who took over as Guild Master on our favourite video games when I got tired of it. I constantly have to fight for the iPad because she's playing the latest version of Angry Birds. Geek? You're already there, hon.
It's a huge switch from when I was a kid, when a guy would be spending the evening at home — alone and possibily tending wounds — if he called his girlfriend a geek. But back then — in the days when hackers knew the difference between freaking and phreaking — being a geek was almost exclusively male and often required special equipment.
But today being a geek is easy and at times even cool. It's glorified in movies like Paul and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Computers — once an anathema to females — are now the IT (pun intented) gift, especially if it happens to have a piece of half-eaten fruit as its logo. But that's what the web is doing to us. You can't survive in today's world without knowing about technology.
Going on a trip? Managing your finances? Playing a game? Talking to friends? Going shopping? We're not at the stage — not yet, anyway — where technology is required to do those things, but for many of us, we can't get going without using technology.
And let's not forget about your job. Want to make the Forbes 500? That list is dominated by two types of people, bankers and geeks. And who wants to be banker in this day and age? Over the past 10 years, technology has been one of the few thriving industries.
While many banks were falling like 10-pins in 2008, companies like Twitter and Facebook were just getting started on the road to greatness.
There is talk about a second tech bubble, especially around the app markets, but unlike 2001, technology companies today have found a stable way to make money. Lots of it. We learned a lot from the Pets.com sock puppet.
Even it you don't have a billion dollar idea, you will still need to be a geek at work. For those of us in the media, not being tech savvy, aka a geek, is a fast way to a mandatory career change. Want to be a tech reporter? Then be prepared to know everything from 32nm chip fabrication to the manufacturing price of the last touch screen.
Once you've started down the silicon road, however, it's only a matter of time before you ask questions like "Don't you have the 3G version," or " What do you mean you don't have a 128GB version in stock?" And as I have been informed by my female friends, women will still be asking, "Do you have that in another colour?"
