Geek Humor
INDIVIDUAL: A Geek
GROUP SIZE: Legions of Boomers
NATURE OF GROUP: Having a last laugh
INCIDENCE OF SOCIOMETRY: Geek Humor
This report was originally published on a tri-fold display
at Sociometry Fair 2008 in Chicago.
From a First Laugh in 1958 to a Last Laugh in 2008
It was 1958 and the race was on…After the Sputnik launches in 1957, the U.S. was desperate to create mathematicians and scientists. In Social Studies lessons, we saw our first pictures of them. They wore white shirts and ties to work, or funny glasses and long, white coats. They had plastic pocket protectors to hold different colors of pencils and leaky ballpoint pens.
They were Pencil Necks.
They did something mysterious. It wasn’t a real job like our dads had-building cars or driving trains. And they looked funny (geeky?), so it was fun making fun of them.
Change was afoot. In 1958, the National Defense Education Act established the first federal student loan program. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy asked that all U.S. schoolteachers encourage able students to pursue mathematics and science.
I was one of a dozen eighth graders in a church-run school. We filled the leftmost two columns in the room; seventh graders occupied the rightmost three columns. I was sitting there, third from the back in the inside column. It was time for math class, but instead of immediately going over yesterday’s homework, the teacher made an announcement. “The President of the United States has asked all teachers in the country to encourage students to study math and science. If you are good at math or science you can get a good job when you grow up and it will help the country. There is such a big need for math and science people that even girls can now be mathematicians or scientists.” What a concept. I liked math and was good at it.
Yes, I was a little geeky even back in 8th grade. But you can see from my nice hairdo and plaid dress that I was trying to be pretty like my popular sisters. (And no, my nose isn’t quite that big. School photographers weren’t always clever then.)
When I registered for 9th grade in the big public school, I was one of many students who were put into an accelerated math program. We lived in a small city of blue-collar families, but now even kids like us were being encouraged to go to college.
What kind of work would we do, we wondered? We’d be pencil necks, someone said. What’s that? Well, they aren’t regular pencil pushers that do desk jobs, but they do use pencils and do math or science. Who wants to be a pencil neck? No one. But we’d take the assigned class and see how hard it is.
The greasers were calling us pencil necks. We fought back by saying “We were going to college.” So in the early 1960s, the pencil-neck insult morphed into Joe College for most of us. But we were still teenagers, so the socially inept intellectuals were still called misfits or retards (a term we did not apply to mentally retarded people).
We were Joe College misfits.
My parents talked a lot about getting an education so you can get a better job. My dad worked two jobs and my mom managed the house and five kids, and eventually took on a part-time job too. In 1965, the federal student loan guarantee program began, guaranteeing loans provided by banks and non-profit lenders. With a scholarship and a loan, going to college was now really possible. A lot of parents in my community must have talked like mine. 75% of the kids in my high school went to colleges or universities.
Other university students didn’t make fun of us. Some were hippies and others radicals but being smart was not cause for scorn. I was only verbally attacked once, but it was by a math professor for having the nerve to take a place in his class, instead of majoring in early elementary education. It made me realize I was the only girl in that class, and maybe I should major in biology after all.
There were challenges for both boys and girls but still great numbers of former-laboring-class Joe Colleges entered the work force in the 1970’s-and started repaying student loans. The name-calling changed. Now we were called things like
Engineer, Teacher, Biologist.
The New Age of the 60’s and early 70’s gave way to the Disco Era. By the early 1980’s we were hearing a lot about Yuppies. The spotlight was on being young upwardly mobile professionals on Wall Street or in business. There was a surge of these successful women and men. Science and math types were relegated to second class in popular culture. They were becoming heavily involved with computers, which not many people could understand. So they were called
weirdos, nerds, dorks or just rejects.
But secretly, many of those successful, young business people were the ones who knew something about computers too.
By the late 80’s, talk about computers was commonplace but computers were not. Computer Science and Engineering were hot universities degrees. But programmers were still weirdos, too compulsive about those machines and languages.
By the mid 1990’s personal computers were commonplace in businesses, universities, and research labs. Lots of people had them in their homes too. Now the public wanted to know things that weirdo, nerds, and dorks knew. Insults weren’t helpful.
So they became geeks.
It was a new idea. The geeks had discussions about the definitions of nerds, dorks, and geeks. Early insulters had not made such fine distinctions. Frankly, none of those labels was satisfactory to the geeks themselves. Someone in our crowd decided that we should name ourselves.
So we became tech-weenies.
The weenie thing never appealed to me personally, as a label for myself. But I was too busy trying to make a living and doing really interesting work in aerospace to energize too many brain cells on it.
By the beginning of the 21st Century, computers were everywhere-ovens, machines, watches, and miniature tools for exploring inside blood vessels. Everyone who could afford one had a desktop computer at home or a laptop, maybe both. Even artists! Even factory workers! Being knowledgeable about computers was WAY COOL. Popular culture decided
we were lovable GEEKS.
Maybe geeks dress funny, and are sometimes social noobs-but isn’t that cute. They understand computers, and maybe math or physics or science. Even business managers, artists, musicians, and high-school fast food clerks can now be GEEKS. Wow, such fun!
By 2008, there are TV shows glamorizing GEEKS. They poke fun at social ineptness. But most of those geeks have good jobs or have the potential for making a good living. There are magazines and catalogs catering to all varieties of geeks. At the same time, too many non-geeks-both young and old-are losing out by being downsized when their jobs move across the world.
So in 2008, those baby boomers who survived being called
pencil necks,
Joe College,
retards,
rejects,
misfits,
weirdos,
nerds,
dorks,
tech-weenies,
to finally become geeks
are now getting the last laugh. No longer are we the brunts of jokes and insults. Now we can do the laughing about being “the mother of all geeks” as well as grandmothers literally of new-generation geeks. Hordes of new geeks are replacing the first-generation geeks who are heading into retirement. It’s not too late. And geeks are in every field now. You too can become one of the now
HONORED GEEKS!
We are now having a last laugh, not the last laugh, and certainly not yet the last gasp for boomer geeks.
–
Submitted by Agent Annette DeMay, June 2008
Download the Geek Humor Attachment Pack of word docs and jpegs for inter-office spamming!
Tags: Guerilla Sociometry, Institute of Sociometry, is, is agent, Sociometry Fair