dave

The story was this: I was doing some consulting work at Integral Systems Incorporated over the summer. They're working on a project and needed SAIC's expertise, so we were helping them out (for gross money, I bet). Anyway, there was this stunning female there that I would see walking around and whatnot. Probably 20, 22. Very young. Dressed very prep-like - nice shirt tucked into khakis with a long sleeve shaw-type-thingy over it. And there was this bit of a nerdy guy. Stupid looking glasses, goofy tucked in shirt, the whole nine yards. Now, he's pretty much proclaiming to be a computer genius when he's around her - they're setting this thing up. And he's just tossing out these terms in a way that any experienced nerd, such as myself, could spot his faking. So they're standing there in the same room as I (but it's a big room, and they're relatively far away) and he says something about "But yeah, I set up my own network at home." And this just sets her off. Not in an anger sort of way, but in a flurry-of-technical-terms way. She's like "Really? Is it 10Base2 or 10BaseT or 100?" "What brand of network cards do you like? I like Linksys because they're pretty well supported under most operating systems and they're also pretty cheap. But cards based on Realtek's 8139 chipset are generally pretty cheap too, and every OS has a driver for that." "Yeah, I had this problem one time, the NIC in my computer died and I had to swap it out, but I forgot to call the cable company and tell them about my MAC address change. It took me like an hour to figure that one out." You get the idea. She very obviously knew what she was talking about, and he was just standing there, stupefied, nodding his head. I thought it was funny 'cause he very obviously thought she had no idea what he was talking about (and therefore, that he could make it up) - he bought the stereotype. So I'm sitting there watching in amusement and he was looking like a tool. Man. I would pay money to see that again.