COLUMN: Geeks need food, badly
I’m sure there are at least five of six people out there expecting me to say something about Halo 2 coming out last week. Well too bad. I’m not.
Of course, there’s a perfectly good reason – I don’t own an X-box, or any other game console for that matter.
Now I don’t want to hear any rants about how a geek without a game console is like a Goth without the black nail polish. Unless you’re going to donate money to the cause, just keep under your Strongbad beanie.
As far a Halo 2 goes, yes I’ve heard it’s awesome – that it’s the best thing since bread, sliced or not. I’ve heard people say they would happily marry it, were it not an inanimate object and therefore probably only in the relationship for a green card.
Speaking of unwholesome affection toward electronic devices, I would like to publicly come out and say that I love my microwave.
Without my microwave I would have starved to death along time ago. I just don’t have time for anything else. Let me give you a glimpse of the average geek’s eating habits.
The geek comes home at night, after a combination of a full day of classes and maybe a part time job or many hours in the lab. He/she gets home after midnight when most stores and restaurants are closed. They get a random frosted encrusted substance from the freezer.
After three minutes in the microwave the radiation has mixed with the glob of preservatives and it becomes food. The geek sits down at his computer desk and prepares to eat. As they bring the fork to their mouth they think to themselves, “Good crap, this is breakfast!”
I’m not over exaggerating. I don’t know how the rest of the people do for themselves but I know that geeks eat using the same style as cougars namely eating 25 pounds in one sitting because you might not get another meal for a week.
We need food – really bad. Seriously, anytime you have people spend six or more hours in front of a computer with out any physical movement and they’re still underweight, it’s a health concern.
They should let us eat in the labs. I agree that the no food and drink rule should hold for most labs, but I feel the people who frequent the Engineering and Computer Science Labs have enough experience with eating in front of their home computers that they know the system (the system is, right hand works the mouse, left hand works the mouth)
Geeks can get really good at this eating system. I know a guy who ate a super sized Big Mac meal with one hand while fighting off three armies of orcs with the other.
If they still don’t trust us to eat and keep our hands clean then we should just geek our way around using our hands. Using the latest in pet shop food pellet delivering technology I believe I have come up with a solution.
Over each computer we should have a hanging water bottle filled with Mountain Dew and/or A&W root beer on the left. On the right we need a chute that connects to a central bin of green food pellets. That, or already unwrapped Kit-Kat bars. Come 10:45 p.m. in the lab, we’re usually too hungry to notice a difference.
I figure once we get the geeks’ bellies full there’s nothing they can’t accomplish. Armies travel on their stomach regardless of whether they are marching off to battle with the hated enemy or doing really complex and convoluted math problems.
There’s a powerful geek army here. Let’s keep them fed before they die.
With a little food, they will be able to geek on.
Steve Shinney is a columnist at the Utah Statesman. Comments can be sent to him at steveshinney@cc.usu.edu