How to Out Geeks in Corporate America

In my career, I am slowly moving from corporate IT departments to corporate project management departments. I PMed a small project last year and am the vice-PM (or as I call it, the "official toady to the PM") on my current project.

I don't like writing about work - all those ideas are going to be in an often-talked-about-but-never-actually-built "Professional Blog." The whole idea of the Professional Blog is to establish a stronger "professional" web presence just in case prospective employers decide to Google me and find my penchant for calling challenging co-workers, "festering boogerheads."

But that is neither here nor there. I want to write about how I keep outing geeks on the job.

In IT, it doesn't matter if you are a geek or not. Like the state of Texas, everyone assumes if you are here by choice, you ain't quite right. Because we're all not quite right, we make this silent agreement - I will tolerate your foibles if you will tolerate mine. IT people tolerate such quirks as poor grooming habits, anger management issues, or claims of psychic abilities. Basically the mantra in IT is, "If you do your job and do it well, we don't care about anything else."

Management is a little different. Management cares about appearances, non-quirky personalities, and the thread count of your tie. So much about management focuses on the appearance of success, so quirky little eccentricities are considered suspicious signposts that you might be a failure.

I can't help but be my geeky self, and sometimes I accidentally out other management people as geeks. The most recent example happened during a meeting where we were discussing a drop in first quarter profits. After the announcement, I said in a deep resounding voice, "Elf shot the food."

Only the geeks laughed.

And I assume only the truly geeky will laugh at this blog post.