Work is a bit busy at the moment, I have the happy task of refactoring the platform in the hope that it'll be more flexible for the future. I'm a little worried this particular task is:

a) Critical to the future
b) Something I don't have the background knowledge to achieve
c) About as interesting as a Emo Kids.

The real downside is that it's zapping up what little brain power I have in the day, so the evening projects really arn't getting the attention they deserve, though the new networking stuff is coming on nicely now.

As a side effect of working on this new project, I've moved over to the other side of the office. It's an interesting place with new interesting people. I was talking to a collegue in the rec. room the other day remarking on the technical competence and diversity of the populace of my work place. We both agree the standard of engineers here is by far the highest we've seen. By luck (or hopefully judgement) the company has managed to only employ people that are capable of doing the job - which having worked around the IT industry for 10 years now (a fact that scared the hell out of me last week) is extremely rare. Normally there are at least some people that are carried by everyone else most of the time.

The really intersting bit to me was his next comment though:

"there arn't too many geeks either"

Now I'm sure he didn't mean anything by this but given the context it was extremely strange. It could have been understood as "and at least there arn't too many geeks" - or at least a positive spin on that fact. Now whats interesting to me is:

1) How terrible that sentiment is if it was indeed the case.
2) How much that fits in with what I was beginning to think was a paranoid delusion about the "culture" here
3) How ridiculous that would have been to say to me.

As the few who read this blog probably already know (or have guessed), I'm pretty much the geek. I don't like sport, I like computers - alot. I see the world in black and white (binary if you want to get dramatic). I tend to over react to situations, making an easy target. I like sci-fi. I find socialising hard. I'm a geek.

And frankly, to look at me, it's obvious.

So, I have to assume the comment wasn't meant like that, something that as a geek I'm not very good at doing. Even so, it was an interesting interaction.

And more importantly, it gave me something to blog about this morning.