Geeks by Jon Katz Read Free Book Online

unwitting role in this decision. During one of my preliminary telephone conversations with Jesse to set up this visit, he’d lamented the poor quality of life in Caldwell, and I’d asked him why he didn’t move.
    He seemed amazed at the question. “What do you mean?”
    “Well, there’s almost no unemployment among geeks,” I told him casually. “Geeks can get jobs almost anyplace. People everywhere need people who can maintain, repair, and understand computer systems. It’s a universal need, don’t you think?”
    I thought Jesse was skeptical of the idea—he hadn’t said two words in response—but he immediately did what I later learned was his almost stock response to any notion, question, or suggestion. He went online, cranked up a search engine, started browsing. He hopscotched electronically around the country, hour after hour for days, browsing through the help-wanted ads on newspaper websites in dozens of American cities.
    Jeez, he told Eric. Katz is right. We can go anywhere we want. Let’s get the hell out of here.

GEEK VOICES
    July 1997
    Years ago the geeks would never have been tolerated in the corporation. You played by the rules of the bureaucracy or you didn’t play at all. Several things have conspired, though, to make them more palatable. The bureaucracy is less entrenched and the workplace is more diverse.
    Corporate life is no longer the white Anglo-Saxon male in a white shirt and dark tie. If you are going to be working with women, blacks, gays, and people from every country on earth, does the geek really stand out as much? The rules are different now. In addition, the pace of technology has made it almost impossible to keep up unless you are at least a little geeky. If you want to compete today you had better have a few geeks on your staff.
    —Mark

    2
    THE CAVE
    From: Jesse Dailey
    To: Jon Katz
    When I was looking on the Tribune, there were 433 jobs under Computer/Info Systems, under every other category I looked in there was an average of 15–20. . . . A total of about 40% computers. The problem now isn’t finding a place in which those jobs are in demand, because like you say . . . they are everywhere. The problem is finding a place that wants to hire someone like me. In a Human Resources kinda way I’m defined as 19 w/ one year of experience. . . . In reality, I am an ageless geek, with years of personal experience, a fiercely aggressive intelligence coupled with geek wit, and the education of the best online material in the world. Aarrgghh!! too much stress being a geek on the move.:)
    >   >   >
    JESSE AND Eric lived in a cave—an airless two-bedroom apartment in a dank stucco-and-brick complex on the outskirts of Caldwell. Two doors down, chickens paraded around the street.
    The apartment itself was dominated by two computers that sat across from the front door like twin shrines. Everything else—the piles of dirty laundry, the opened Doritos bags, the empty cans of generic soda pop, two ratty old chairs, and a moldering beanbag chair—was dispensable, an afterthought, props.
    Jesse’s computer was a Pentium II 300, Asus P2B (Intel BX chipset) motherboard; a Matrix Millenium II AGP; 160 MB SDRAM with a 15.5 GB total hard-drive space; a 4X CD-recorder; 24X CD-ROM; a 17-inch Micron monitor. Plus a scanner and printer. A well-thumbed paperback—Katherine Dunn’s novel
Geek
Love—
served as his mousepad.
    Eric’s computer: an AMD K-6 233 with a generic motherboard; an S3 video card, a 15-inch monitor; a 2.5 GB hard drive with 36 MB SDRAM. Jesse wangled the parts for both from work.
    They stashed their bikes and then Jesse blasted in through the door, which was always left open since he can never hang on to keys, and went right to his PC, which was always on. He yelled a question to Eric about the new operating system. “We change them like cartons of milk,” he explained. At the moment, he had NT 5, NT 4, Work Station, Windows 98, and he and Eric had begun fooling