The Revenge Of The Non Geeks

Every person has one large fear which they are obsessed with. For my flat mate, it is running out of bandwidth. We have 2 wi-fi connections, one which is 20mbps and can supply the needs of the floors above and below us. Just as a back-up , we also have a Tata photon and a Reliance dongle because lord forbid, both routers may conspire and go on strike simultaneously. However, since the single woman’s mantra is always “back up the back-up “, we have discretely collected all our neighbor’s wi-fi passwords. After all, you never know, on some dark night all 4 connectors might fail us and then we will be left with no choice but to become Bandwidth Hackers.

But we are middle aged women who like reading, writing and listening to music, we are not geeks.

I went for a holiday with my 3 of best girl pals. Apparently for a 20 day trip we did not need clothes ( one can just buy them along the way), we did not need shoes (one pair of floaters works fine) , we did not need trinkets (because they get lost on long road journeys),  but what we critically needed were

1.       4 cameras- A digital SLR, a digital which is almost an SLR, an instant with a Leica lens , an old non digital SLR and  a baffling number of other lens. You see, we had all been asked to take up hobbies to cope with the stress of our lives and everyone knows it’s really easy to look cool behind a camera. On the other hand if we had taken up yoga, we would have to spend a lot of time with our heads between our knees and our bottoms up. Not Cool

2.       4 phones: 1 Fablet, 1 IPhone, 1 Nokia Lumia, 1 Google Phone. We obviously  liked to distribute our affections and don’t want to piss any smart phone manufacturer off

3.       3 tablets: 2 IPADS and 1 Google Nexus tablet because how do you navigate without a tablet and check your mails and put Fb updates at the same time, so what if the GPS in the car is shouting itself hoarse , the only purpose that GPS ever serves…..is to second guess it.

4.       5 laptops: 4 regular laptops and 1 mini lap top. The mini is  for downloading movies from torrentz and the 4 lap tops are for that terrifying holiday minute when  one gets a call from office and one has to suddenly get out in the middle of nowhere and start building charts or do some complicated excel work on a balloon ride or at the end of a bungee rope.

5.       4 kindles: We started with 2 kindles and we bought 2 more as gifts because as mentioned before, we love reading and writing and know other middle aged women like us who do the same things.

6.       2 IPODS:  We call it force of habit, since they were all the rage 5 years back and our classics were stored on them.

7.       A  JBL “bug” as a back-up for the car stereo (what if a loose connection disables the surround sound and one has to drive without music )and an army of headphones and hard drives to back up all the content one is generating , downloading or copying.

However if you called any of these girls geeks , they would be shocked as would some of our male buds . When I was in the market for a cell phone, I was told by one of them “ You should buy an I-Phone , after all you wouldn't know how to use half of the android apps.”  For god’s sake, I have yet to download a difficult app.  it’s an app, its supposed to be super easy , don’t make it sound like it’s the last frontier.

 But what would I know , I am not a geek! Geeks have engineering degrees, drink beer and know all the right terminology, we are mere social scientists , drink wine , and keep nick names for our tech-wares. We can't be geeks.