Webninja.org

i skipped prom to write code and drink mountain dew

It’s kind of sad isn’t it? I guess I really didn’t have any girls pining for me to ask them out. Hell I could say I skipped high school to write code and drink mountain dew. True you’ve read me talk about bringing back the geek. Claiming the geek in me is dead. It may be dormant, but it’ll be here forever.

[geek] I learned this today while dialing into a site in Idaho. I was given the task to dial into a remote system, update a tcl script and then manually edit 10 different files to change a value in them. One thing I’ve *always* done my entire life is look at the efficiency of a given process. For example, when I started here, everyone used the Kermit Protocol to transferr files to remote systems. Granted the documentation to transfer files was written back in 1999, but back in 1995 I was using Xmodem/CRC. Yes that’s write folks, error correction! [/geek]

I think it all comes down to me being a natural problem solver. I love looking at a problem and saying “this should be done this way”. I’ve done it my entire life. When I was younger I was pulling apart my Transformers to see how they worked. When I started working, I reorganized the way ingredients were laid out in a more efficient manner. While reading procedures at work now, I question why they’re not done a certain way. Granted this has lead me to butting heads with supervisors. Sometimes there’s something to be said about the work needed to be more efficient vs. leaving a process as it is.

Thus I’ve decided what my answer will be in the future during interviews when I’m asked why I’m a better candidant than the others. I’m a geek. Regardless of what I might do outside of work, I’m still a geek at work. From reading all of the sites I’ve read for years, to using my past experience to redesign a process. It’s a certain quality you can’t learn in school. They can’t teach you how to think the way that I do along with the thousands of other geeks. It’s impossible to learn certain things, methods of problem solving in school and on the job.