• Join The Fed
• Advertise with The Fed

• About Us
• Contact

In This Issue

• The Spec Almost Led Me Into White Slavery
• Where Have All the Strippers Gone?
• Abused by Geriatrics Without Prozac
• Letters to the Editor(s)
• Marauding Interviewer
• Free to Speak? Shut Up!
• Where It's Safe to Sodomize
• Unionized Columbians Become Denizens of Primal Gangland
• CAVA Shifts Focus from Medicine to Profitability
• Garment Grabber Liberates Clothes From Floor
• Legless Pigeon Recounts Tales of Early Abuse
• Geek has +9 Indifference Cloak Against Discrimination
• Columbia Hits Me Where the Bruises Will Never Show
• We Have a Film Critic?
• The Future Is Now, and It's Pointing and Laughing
• Juice Review - A Mango Juice Odyssey
• Fed Favorites
• I Hate You Damn Happy People
• Your Pets Will Be Waiting for You in Hell
• Fruitloop and Dandy
• Wacky Fun Abuse!
• My AIM is True
• A Word from Our Advertisers
• THEY Watch
• The Staff of 17.7

Our recent transition from Black History Month to Women's History Month serves as an invitation to reflect on upon the odd phenomenon of calendar real estate. There is nary a special interest group that hasn't marked a spot on the calendar and staunchly refused to budge, insisting that it is their right to have a week or a month to revel in their differences. With this trend, it is only a matter of time before the public expression of superficiality-based intolerance becomes extinct. But as a member as one of the last remaining groups that it is okay to despise, I have got to wonder why there is not a Geek History Month.

We are raised in a society that bombards our children with cleverly-concealed lists of reasons why it's not permissible to dislike someone. You know, the films where our hero or heroine is initially persecuted, but never fails to triumph over adversity or become a tragically beautiful martyr in time for the closing credits. Unfortunately, the same media that produce these shining testimonials to human perseverance have also been known to turn around and proclaim that the one thing it is not okay to be is a geek.

Observe the role of the geek in popular culture: we spend most of our time being stuffed into lockers, given wedgies, and beaten mercilessly with our science fiction novels. If we are lucky, "ugly duckling" movies such as "The Princess Diaries" and "She's All That" will charitably attempt to "cure" us of our eccentricities. The only times in recent memory that the cards have come up in our favor were in "Animal House" and the "Revenge of the Nerds" movies, the latter so awful that we can hardly claim them as a mark in our favor.

You are probably asking why the hell you should care about the plight of the geeks. But if you are reading this, chances are better than average that you yourself are a geek. Perhaps not by the narrowly conceived definition of "someone who can install a RAM chip in a ten-year-old computer while blindfolded and with one arm tied behind his back," but a geek nonetheless. While some varieties of geek are pretty obvious - the hackers, the gamers, the fen, the otaku, and the SCAdians - others are decidedly less so. You are probably a geek if you spend more time with your music collection than your significant other, if your clothing takes up less closet space than your comic books, or if you have ever waited in line to get something signed by a writer, musician, or almost anyone who's not a professional athlete. Throughout history, they have called us nerds, dweebs, witches, communists, and stark raving mad. The unifying factor? Anal attention to one's own nonconformity.

The only consolation for our unpopularity is that, as time passes, and it becomes a boon rather than a drawback to be techno-savvy and obsessive, it is the geeks who will control the world. Those of you who were jocks or bullies in high school need only wait: someday, revenge will be ours.

Not that I am making any threats, mind you. There is no need to. Just visualize the day when someone has severed the network connection to your computer, and your computer alone. Or you suddenly log onto Student Services Online to discover that the A- you thought was assured in Lit Hum has suddenly turned out to be a D, and your diploma is being withheld because you have accrued a $347 library fine for the late return of a bound volume of seventies-era Playboys. Or when you wind up living in a 218 square foot double in Wien as a senior because you pissed off the guy who writes the software that generated your "random" lottery number.

All of which is, admittedly, somewhat petty. Our most devastating payback has probably never been phrased better than by Violent Femmes frontman Gordon Gano, who sang the immortal lines, "Somebody stole all my clothes that I like to wear/But I'm so rich and famous, baby. What do I care?/I'll make more money tonight than you ever dreamed of/You thought I was strange, just look at me now."

How can you possibly feel superior to us when your job security is at our mercy, the economy squirms within our Carpal Tunnel Syndrome-stricken hands, and we're cooler than you, to boot?

Geekdom, you see, has its merits. Who needs culture heroes when you've got billionaires? Maybe the calendar doesn't yet contain a Geek Pride week, but you can bet that we'll still be smiling with self-satisfaction every year when Bill Gates' birthday rolls around.

The author is the president of the Columbia University Science Fiction Society, an employee of AcIS, and probably talks to more geeks each day than you will in a decade of calling technical support lines.