Inner Whizdom

[I wrote this in 2006 to be published in a book called She's Such A Geek]

Do Not Call Me Maam : Technophiles of a Certain Age
By Elizabeth A. Sumner

When most women my age think of silicon and clean rooms they’re not thinking about ion implantation and chip manufacturing. My friends get excited about shoes and jewelry. I get hot for software and pop physics. For Christmas this year my best friend asked Santa for a new crock-pot. I wanted a USB audio interface.

I’m a geek.

You can’t really tell by looking at me. I’m a woman in my 50s. I live in rural New England. I studied social sciences in college and didn’t touch a computer until I was 30. That’s because they didn’t exist.

I only recently identified this geeky aspect of my personality. At first I thought it was some strange phenomenon of mid-life, like chin whiskers. Could it be the long-term influence of my comic collecting, Tolkein-obsessed husband? Was our attraction a cause or an effect? Or was geekiness some ploy to slow the march of time by dabbling in youth culture? Maybe MP3s and cascading style sheets will keep me young?

But as I think back I realize I’ve always been fascinated by new technology and obscure subcultures. I’ve always been an early adopter when I could afford it. I’ve always hungered to be different, long before computers took over our lives.

I’m not sure where this technical fascination came from. My mother disliked and feared machines. She kept wax paper and tin foil in the broken dishwasher rather than get it repaired. She didn’t learn to drive until she was 40. And I wasn’t allowed to operate the Magnavox—her prized hi-fi. It was too delicate and precious. But she was hip in her way.

In college she sold contraceptives on the dorm at Bryn Mawr, and sent the proceeds to Spanish Civil War relief. She organized labor at Campbell’s Soup, lived in Greenwich Village in the 1950s, and refused to testify when called before the House Un-American Activities Commission. My father was cool enough to appreciate a woman like her and not at all tied to traditional stereotypes. He cooked and sewed and cried at the movies.

Though bright, I was no prodigy and didn’t excel at math or science. But I did like being outrageous. In sixth grade we were given an assignment to read one of a series of career books. The options for girls in those days (1966) were titles like I Want To Be A Schoolteacher or I Want To Be A Nurse. I chose I Want To Be A Truck Driver.

I didn’t do it to be a feminist. I did it to be funny. I already knew that women could do or be anything we wanted. I wasn’t political, just interesting. I remember my mother explaining to me that she’d rather I got A’s and F’s than all C’s. Mediocrity was worse than failure. She was walking me to school at the time. I was in kindergarten.

In those days it was a good idea to disguise atypical gender behavior as something acceptable, like a manhunt. In fifth grade I did a science project for extra credit as an excuse to ask Jeff Stryker to be my assistant. In junior high my best friend, Kathy, and I did a computer-dating project with index cards and a hole punch. Kathy did the analysis and ended up with ultra-hot Dave DiBiase. Somehow I got matched with Jim Palmer– practically the nerdiest guy in school. (He wore a hat for chrissakes. I’d like to check those findings, Kathy).

Those of us who later would qualify as full-fledged geeks started out as weirdos. We wrote poetry, listened to folk music, and thrived in Drama Club. Actors, artists, and musicians made an acceptable social circle so even if we were excluded from top-tier popularity, we had a certain level of status. Plus it was the 1960s so being non-conformist was mainstream.

We wrote our term papers on manual typewriters with cloth ribbons and hoped our correction fluid hadn’t dried up. Documents were duplicated by mimeograph stencils and layers of carbon paper.

Throughout high school and college I was attracted to geeky men—arty, creative, intelligent. In those days I thought I was going along for the ride, just visiting their geek world. I was Jill Average, who happened to collect HO train cars and Battlestar Gallactica models. Now I realize the pattern is so consistent that I participated because I wanted to.

Other women were breaking barriers and burning bras in the 1970s. One of my greatest accomplishments of the time was having the prototype of Tyco’s Glow in the Dark Loop-De-Loop Slot Car Track on display in my living room (thanks to a close relationship with its designer). We tested experimental cars made with cobalt magnets that NEVER left the track. Those things would fly. Too bad they were radioactive.

Those of you who grew up in the digital age can’t fully appreciate the thrill of new toys and capabilities. Everything is so available now. Ordinary schmoes can program radio stations and set up multinational videoconferences. When I got my first apartment you had to call a telephone repairmen in order to connect a phone to the wall. We saw movies only at the whim of the theater owners (one movie per theater) or the television stations—all three of them.

In 1976 I bought a Fairchild Video Entertainment System for the man in my life so he could play variations on Pong. I was never much for the games that involved eye-hand coordination. I preferred solitaire and video poker. But having the latest toys was important.

Not long after I spent an enormous amount of money to be an early adopter of a video cassette recorder. The idea of actually owning a movie, watching it any time I wanted, or recording something from TV gave me a rush that was almost sexual. I used this miraculous technology to tape Richard Chamberlain in The Thorn Birds and ALL of the Frankie and Annette Beach Blanket movies.

I was vaguely aware that there was such a thing as a computer but you had to know some secret code to run the thing and no one I knew had one. In those days I was playing with art supplies and hanging out with graphic designers at an ad agency. They had typography and stat machines and Xerox copiers—enough fun machines to keep me entertained.

One day in 1983 a client sent in an ad for something called a Macintosh. The tag line said this was “The Computer for the Rest of Us” and they invited you to come in and “Test Drive” one. I knew I’d be in big trouble if I ever got my hands on one of those. It looked like all the fun and none of the work of other computers. From that moment on my heart belonged to Apple. I didn’t own a Mac for another four years but their design and style have kept me loyal.

Not to say that all their ideas were winners. My friend had an Apple Lisa. He encouraged me to try it out—see what it could do. He assured me that even in my ignorance I couldn’t do anything catastrophic. I managed to initialize his word processing program and erased his disk. But he wasn’t angry. He taught me fearlessness and that essential question, “What happens when I do this?”

In 1985 I used a PC successfully for the first time—this time a Wang. I was 31 and working at a temp job. They had me entering data into a P&L statement. I backspaced where I shouldn’t have and deleted a tab, which turned everything on screen to a jumbled mess. Lara, (the Data Processing department), took one look and was able to see how to line up the columns again. She must have seen something in me worth her patience because she took me under her wing. She was my first experience of programmer creativity. Lara loved jazz and code and the Seattle Seahawks. She was miserly with information and difficult for non-geeks to comprehend. I created a job for myself as DP Liaison to the Marketing Department simply because I could communicate with Lara and get data out of her department. In a very short time I became one of the top techhies and assisted the company’s largest customers who placed orders over early modem devices.

In 1987 I met and fell in love with a creative geek genius, Michael Cohen. His degree was in art and computers. He’d written an interactive text game in Pascal on his Apple II based in part on the Dungeons and Dragons game he and his buddies had been playing for 15 years. The game was brilliant but obsolete. Gaming had moved on to graphics and he didn’t feel like keeping up with the new languages. Instead he combined a lifelong interest in comics with his talent for art and self-published a comic called Strange Attractors. The book featured scantily clad space chicks, highly detailed, futuristic cityscapes, and a great story (co-written by Mark Sherman) about the war between science and magic. It was critically acclaimed but unfortunately not widely read. [Trina Robbins included several panels in The Great Women Super Heroes (Kitchen Sink 1996).]

I still thought of myself as a bourgeois guest in another world. I did find it fascinating in a sociological-study-sort-of-way to explore the subculture of Comix. We went to the San Diego Comicon a couple of times and enjoyed the zoo of androgynous boys dressed as Morpheus, and men with breasts wearing U.S.S. Enterprise insignia. I’ve spent countless hours in social situations with comic guys and not once did anyone ask, “So what do you do?” Unless you’re a creator you’re invisible.

Once we stalked Gilbert Hernandez of Love And Rockets. (Actually we just parked in front of his house and thought about looking in his trash). Then there was the time I sat four feet away from Robert Crumb at the Misfit Lit Contemporary Comic Art Show in 1991 and watched him tilt his chair back so far that he fell over. All the other Fantagraphics stars of the time were on the same stage—Dan Clowes, Peter Bagge, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez. I’d read most of them and enjoyed some but I can’t say I’m a real comic fan– too much misogyny. And it’s not how I like my stories told. But it was cool to be part of the scene. Despite their lack of social finesse, for the most part I enjoyed being a woman in a man’s world. It was foreign and fascinating.

I went back to grad school in 1991 and at least this time I had a computer. The school was 90 miles from my home and the students were spread out all over the Northwest. Companies were just beginning to make use of networking, emulation, and inter-organizational email. We heard tell of such technologies but they weren’t readily available to poor grad students. I sure could have used collaborative software for virtual teams if I’d known what it was.

In early 1994 an Internet Service Provider started up in the small city in Washington where we lived. This is what I’d been waiting for. I’d considered Compuserve and AOL but they didn’t have local numbers in my area and I didn’t want some gatekeeper to the real Internet. I got myself a brand new 14400 modem so my data could really zoom. Two guys in a spare room started this ISP. I was their first ever Mac hookup and they weren’t quite sure what to make of me. They gave me at least 20 hours of free, in-home consulting time to get things working right. I bought an Internet guide that came with a copy of Eudora, Gopher, Archie, Fetch, Telnet and Mosaic, and I was on my way.

For the first few days I couldn’t leave this magic window on the world. I stayed at my desk practically day and night. Kathy, my partner in the 7th grade computer dating project, and lifelong friend, had access through her university. Though three thousand miles apart, we were equally obsessed. We’d play the Internet Scavenger Hunt, started by Rick Gates of UC Santa Barbara, and spend each weekend searching through Gopher files trying to find the contest’s obscure bits of information. I’m sure the people at CERN had us in mind. They somehow knew that Kathy and I needed to Telnet each other a running commentary of the Miss America Pageant as it was happening.

Michael and I read rec.arts.comics.alternative on Usenet and communicated with Strange Attractors fans. Drew Hayes, creator of Poison Elves, didn’t have a computer so he came over one day and dictated while I typed as we did a 1994 version of instant messaging to his fans.

There wasn’t much of a worldwide web in those days—mostly just educational institutions had any presence. About that time Michael and I decided we wanted to move to New England. We picked a town off a map and started doing research online. I found a news story that Vice-President Al Gore had visited our intended destination and announced a grant for a network collaboration in the region. I joined a mailing list for the group; told them we were coming to the area, and asked for information. People were very helpful—offering to rent me housing and help us get settled. After we arrived one of the pen pals even gave me additional hours of free consulting time hooking up my now ancient Mac to the new network.

That fall I got a temp job doing tedious but mindless work. We were adding letters in brackets called “tags” to pages of law books that had been scanned by something called Optical Character Recognition. I did it for a couple weeks before learning that apparently I was doing very basic HTML. I used my newfound skill to create an all-text web page for myself and added it to the hobby space that came with my Internet service. In order to give anyone my address I had to check the piece of paper I carried around so I wouldn’t misplace a slash or a tilde. http://www.monad.net/personal/~schmutz/home.html
It was not an easy handle to remember.

Soon after, everyone came online, or so it seemed. There was the EBay wave and the digital photo folks and the Meet-up craze to name but a few. Different ideas brought in new non-geek users. But many of my generation dragged their heels, or else I hang with some unusually computer-phobic people. Stuff I think is matter of fact is seen as very exotic.

For example, I became actively involved in the campaign to draft General Wesley Clark in the 2004 presidential campaign because of a site I found while surfing. A group of us found each other online and got our candidate within five points of the frontrunner in the New Hampshire primary. Politics has its own breed of geeks.

Then there’s off-the-beaten-track-travel. My husband and I used the Internet to plan our trip to Italy and found places to stay in locals’ spare bedrooms. Instead of Rome for Easter we found a small town in the mountains with a magnificent holy weekend folk pageant affectionately called “The Running of the Madonna.”

At my favorite karaoke bar the owner looked at me like I was a strange visitor from the future when I ask about searching his database electronically instead of paging through the three-ring binders. I volunteered to update his books and combine the multiple files he was using. I gave him the finished product eight months ago and he still hasn’t printed the copies. So now I bring my laptop and everyone asks me to look up songs.

I do sometimes get myself in a little trouble because I’m mostly self-taught and tend to learn things half-assed. Case in point, I volunteered to maintain a website for a club I belong to. I did something that made the files very buggy and I don’t know (yet) how to fix it. That’s the problem, and the joy. I dive in without really knowing what I’m doing. To me it feels like playing with magic. I guess what a line of code does, try an edit. Sometimes it works.

I’ve come to discover that my geekiness is everything I like best about myself. It’s shorthand for my willingness—no, eagerness to be different; my curiosity and creativity; my courage and intelligence and wonder about the world. I like trying to comprehend string theory and turning my computer into a recording studio. I like being the weirdest person I know. I’m proud to be a geek. Sure, it would be nice sometimes to have friends be on my wavelength without me having to explain how I think. I tell them something I think is really cool and they go, “Huh?”

But what if they understood me? Would that mean I’m ordinary? Just to be on the safe side, I’d better move a little farther out.