The Summit of Mount Nerdly

It probably doesn’t come as any big surprise to most of you who know me that I call myself a geek. I am familiar with computers, one might say. I have dabbled in code and graphics design and network administration, internet systems, databases and even paintbrush. Heck, this very site you see in front of you was hand-coded from scratch to finish using nothing more than Notepad++ by yours truly. Meh. Not a large achievement there, but I’m proud of it. I like it. Anyway, I still do some things sometimes that make me step back and blink, and sometimes even go so far as to turn my head and frown, thinking, ‘Damn! I really am an insufferable geek. A ridiculously overboard, head-to-toe nerd to the highest power.’ This here’s one of them stories.

Let me back you up a little bit though, just for the sake of the journal. I took a computer lit and a computer programming class when I was in seventh grade. I did exceedingly well at both, as the language and theory just sort of “clicked” with me. It just made sense. The hot teacher, therefore, invited me back the next year to be her lab assistant. I wish this had some kind of awesome twist to it where I told you stories of being stuck in the lab alone with her on several long, late nights, but alas – nothing like that ever happened. Now my English teacher, on the other hand…

Anyway, I came back the next year and spent the first half of the class in the lab while the other students worked on the literature part, and the second half walking around the lab assisting them with the programming part. It was a cakewalk. I sat in there and screwed around on the computers the whole time. And I’m not sure what it is about knowing how to code in BASIC that doesn’t turn the girls on, but something about it… Boy I’ll tell you, those girls didn’t just flock to me! Though I did get my hand down one of their shirts in art class once… Again, beside the point and hardly relevant here.

So I don’t say that to brag – I mean, who really brags about being a nerd? Well, I guess there are worse things to be called. I mean, I don’t know too many people who feel real sorry for Mark Zuckerberg right about now. Or Bill Gates. Well, maybe Steve Jobs… But I mentioned it to let you know that it was always sort of on the horizon for me. I always knew I would have a job that involved computers somehow. And not just in the evenings. Hey ladies. But I never imagined I would take my geekitude to this level of nerdism. For I pulled the most ridiculous stunt this morning that even I almost threw up in my own mouth a little bit.

The hot marketing girl, we shall call her Jodi, came by to ask about something or other. We get drive-bys like that all the time. There’s a square of cubes where the help desk guys sit, and that’s a great place to be if you’ve got a technical question. So I couldn’t help but notice her peeheeheeheehink shoes. I mean these things were pinker than a carpet burn on a cat’s titty. Pinker than a fresh eraser in a bowlful of strawberry ice cream. Like hot pink. And one of the guys made the comment that they matched her earrings perfectly. And this is where it gets a little ridiculous. Because I am so OCD and – well, some say ‘gay’ – about technical details that I always end up being that guy at a party who says, “Actually…” and holds up his finger.

Sigh.

I know. I hate that about myself. But I held my finger up and said, “Well, actually… They don’t match at all. Her earrings are like hot pink and her sandals are like an orange kangaroo-nipple pink.” They sort of nodded, but no one wanted to disagree. Then Byronic makes the observation that no one should argue with me about shades of pink based on how gay I am. And that I could tell them the hue and shade and its position on the color wheel, juxtaposed with the cooling opposites and the dimensions of the saturation and blah, blah, blah. And I shrugged. Then I did it. I made the most ridiculously nerdy comment one could ever imagine making. I said, “Yeah her earrings were like a hot pink while the sandals were more like a 235/17/94 on the RGB hex color scale.”

Ahem. It got silent.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I was right. Sad to say, I have been editing html and creating websites and tweaking hex codes for colors so long that I know my RGB scale to a fault. And now I’ve perhaps embarrassed myself. I not only got the color in the right ballpark, I nailed that mother cobbler. It’s not close. It’s on. It is the exact color of her sandals. Observe, if you will, the hex color chart on this page. Scroll down and plug those numbers into the Red, Green and Blue color boxes, respectively, and you’ll see the exact color of Jodi’s shoes.

You know, sometimes it’s better just to keep your mouth shut.

This Post Has One Comment

Leave a Reply to Space Cancel reply