At the conference last week some dude was begging around for a spare connector thing for his power cord. (The bit that plugs into the Mac laptop power brick to make it shorter; he wanted to trade a European one for a U.S. one.) And I had just recently had a couple of them in my bag, by accident, and I looked... and then considered giving him mine, if I could recharge a bit first, since I was going home anyway.
And he was not able to grok this. "But are you sure ... are you going to Europe anytime soon... won't you need this one?"
"No... I have tons of them. I'm going home soon, I won't need this one. Or I can bring you an extra one tomorrow."
"Why on earth would YOU have more than one?"
"Dude, I guess I just do. In my bins of spare bits of computer parts and cables and electronic things, the many bins that ANY RIGHT THINKING GEEKLY HUMAN BEING HAS. Don't you have bins of old keyboards and modem bits and things from 1992?"
"Yes! But...."
I don't get why he was so fazed - who did he expect to offer to do such a trade if not a person who had plug thingies to spare? But he could not accept... even when I reiterated... that I had plenty of the things. It was in front of a bunch of old-school sys admin mac nerd type of guys, you know the ones, with grizzled beards and glasses and perhaps a vest; they were all laughing...
So minor, but still... Bah!
Why did you tag this with "sexism?"
Posted by: Barak | January 18, 2007 at 03:55 PM
Well, how about "feeling of alienation correlated with 50 year old guys acting over-surprised that a younger woman might have some computer equipment to spare"...
A not uncommon feeling, closely related to "feeling of alienation correlated with guys acting over-surprised at any evidence of geekiness, such as typing anything at all into a command line interface"
30 years of that sort of thing and I haven't gotten used to it yet and I don't intend to!
Posted by: badgerbag | January 18, 2007 at 07:04 PM
Why do you think that it's your gender that elicited his surprise and not the fact that you are not going to Europe?
Posted by: Barak | January 19, 2007 at 02:40 PM
Maybe it's surprise at someone not wanting anything in return. I guess my point is that there are many possibilities of his surprise, and perhaps it's just me, but I didn't see sexism in your post.
When I was at MIT, everyone was a geek, men and women alike. Some people had boxes of equipment, some didn't. Of the ones that did, some might offer parts with no expectation of a return offer, others not. It was all completely orthogonal to plumbing.
It seems to me that generosity is as rare as geekiness -- rarer at a place like MacWorld.
NB: MIT was about 60% male while I was there, but about 50% male in the dorms, where I lived. The rest of the men were in the Greek system.
Posted by: Barak | January 19, 2007 at 02:52 PM