WiF(e)i - Wife of Nerd

Me being married to a ginormous computer enthusiast - you'd sure take me for someone who speaks "nerd" fluently. Well, now I do, but I didn't when me and hubby first met.

Good old Toshiba - my first laptop

I was a late bloomer, I didn't have a computer until the year 2000. That was when I bought my first laptop, a Toshiba Satellite. A sad little brick, that ran hot and noisy against my desk. I regarded old clunky as a high-class typewriter for writing term papers, and at first I didn't use it for anything else. Oh, but then of course the internet found its way into my daily life, and that changed everything.



I remember using the Word processing power by day, and the dark side of LAN by night, in chat rooms. I met people who called themselves -°;*~Neo~*;°- or TylerD666 in obscure chat rooms. I didn't think much about the digitized world back then, although basically, it was already there and I was a part of it.

Hubby came into my life a little while after I had purchased my Tosh. There was no doubt he was a technophiliac. His apartment appeared to be hardly a notch above an office with a bed. Large, yellowed bed sheets covered windows, the cabinets were crammed with piece parts, and countless empty board boxes piled their way up to the ceiling.

David's former work desk

There was no sofa, but a designated cable cabinet. Back then, I thought that the on/off blinking was what the inside of a computer was supposed to look like. At night the PC and Mac consoles flashed in yellow, red and blue lights. The life signs of the machines. If it hadn't all been behind firm walls, we could have easily been mistaken for the landing strip of an airport. It was kind of romantic though, the good old days of humming CPU fans and blinking lights.



I remember it being a strange sight the first few times, but it all became normal pretty quickly. It was obvious that the computer was both his passion and his livelihood, so there was no dividing line between job and hobby. A jobby. And consequently I realized that what he does is how he lives. Like a writer, surrounded by piles of books. When I think about it, it had an artsy flair to it, that sort of living in the - mostly virtual - moment, which I liked. And it made me rethink other living arrangements.

Like nowadays, living spaces that don't look like people really live in them can freak me out. For me, there needs to be some kind of proof that people really exist, not only the ideal they want to see portrayed to the outside world. Pointy black figurines on end tables tell me nothing. Battered tables, steamrolled rugs on the other hand, that kind of thing I find inviting. Things that are in use. Vintage, but authentically so. I guess it must attribute to the whole idea behind caveman drawings. I lived here, I left my marks. Human habitation, and what a cool concept that is.

You see, I think that over time I got bitten by that same radioactive spider: nerdmaker. It must have built its lair in our apartment...And now it's official. A home, a hubby, a PC - I'm having my cotillion and I'm coming out nerd!