<-- nerd

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why are people always so surprised that i'm a nerd?

first of all i'm not actually referring to anyone specific k? k.

sersly i'm not. look i even spelled seriously all cool and bloggerific to prove it. it's just that this has happened to me for like fifteen years now and i still don't get it. okay wait let me explain a little.

when i meet someone on the street and we get to talking about computers and they express stunnedness that i'm a nerd i can sympathise. i mean i bathe and i'm not ugly and i can use complete sentences AND i even have a social skill or two.

this surprises people. i don't fit their stereotype of someone who can speak technical computer jargon. i mean i go outside!

so i can get their reaction i really can.

it's the others. they meet me in irc (think chatroom you not old timers) or in some message board or mailing list or newsgroup or even (lately) through my blog and we talk about computers and the internet and about a million other things and yet somehow they don't quite believe that i'm real.

the idea that i use unix instead of windows and understand what the guts of my computer are for seems completely foreign to a lot of folks.

don't even get me started on the asshole who actually asked me if he could 'speak to someone more technical' and when i said 'no you can't but i can transfer you to a man if you'd rather' said that he rathered.

because i'm female?

because i have tits i can't operate a computer?
do math?
fly a plane?
play pool?
drive a car?
be smart?

what the fuck do breasts have to do with any of this?

absolutely nothing that's what.

and yet i've been treated as though i couldn't do all of the above things simply because of my gender on more than one occasion in my life. as though what i don't have bouncing between my legs can somehow determine what i will and won't be competent at.

i just do NOT get this at all. not even a tiny little weensy bit.

i mean i get it that i'm going to be surprising if i can carry some crazy load that only a power lifter can heft or if i can arm wrestle rambo and win. those are feats of strength and men tend to have more power in their muscles while women tend to have more endurance.

so uncommon strength is kinda strange in a woman.

but what does the performance ratio of my biceps have to do with my ability to operate a gear shift? a pool cue? NUMBERS????

like nothing at fucking all right?

and yet i've consistently had really strange expectations thrown at me in this regard. i never did manage to convince the system administrators at my former job that i had any kind of clue what i was doing and yet whenever i sent them something it was *always* [yes, every *single* time] something that they needed to do on their end. i never once sent them a spurious ticket.

okay once i sent them something and then took it back and fixed it... so i don't count it. and they were impressed with the fix even and i got kudos.

and still i was just some girl who answered the phone up in tech support.

maybe it's the pocket protector. i don't even have pockets to protect after all (like me the tight shirts). except that back then i showed up to work in sweats so that can't be it.

on my first day on the phones (after two weeks of training) one of the level twos was actually taking people around to my cubicle and pointing me out. eventually even oblivious i noticed and so finally i asked him what was up

'well you're impossible'

"i'm impossible??"

'yeah, you're an anachronism'

"um why?"

'because you speak french'

"so"

'you're also wearing a freebsd sweatshirt and you actually speak computer'

"d-uh it's tech support"

'but you're a chick'

irony? in his case it was the FRENCH that freaked him out. what a sweetie i still miss him. everyone else was shocked by the unix but not him, him it was the french.

i remember not being a feminist. i remember thinking that feminists had pokers up their asses. i even recall wondering what the fuss was about... and it is a testament to my parents that i didn't believe for a second that i needed to be a feminist.

i believed that i was equal.

as such i never felt that i had anything to prove. i was quietly going around getting a's in subjects that girls didn't get a's in but since no one told me that i had no idea. it didn't occur to me that i should have been upset that the boy in my class who was good at math got an award for it and i didn't. though i was his equal or possibly even better (we tied in contests and on tests and even on our second term grade... i'm leaning toward equals.)

i wasn't upset, i had gotten an award for english after all. [truly they should have rewarded us both, and i'm not sulking over a trophy, he and i were equals...]

i remember the moment that i realised that to be equal also meant that i had to be a feminist [in college]. that i had to fight to get what i had heretofore assumed was readily available to me. that i was not going to be offered the same opportunities as people who were my equals because well, i had breasts.

and to this day it baffles me at the way girls are so easily shunted away from science and math as though that is the natural order of things.

the way that people are stunned when a girl can operate a computer. and how somehow even after they realise it?

after you sort of beat their head in about it?

they'll forget again somehow instantly. because i'm impossible after all.

wouldn't want to remember me and the experience of meeting a girl who was also a nerd, that might make you less stunned the next time it happens... and then you might start to realise that lots of girls are nerds and then that old worldview gets turned upside down.

and then what do you do?