Five Reasons I Love Living With a Geek

According to Wikipedia, today is Geek Pride Day, which celebrates the right of every individual to be a nerd or a geek.

I am happily married to a bona fide geek (he’s got the university papers to prove it) and here are five reasons I wouldn’t have it any other way: 

5. Sump Pump First Aid

When the sump pump recently stopped sump pumping late on a Sunday night in the middle of rain-a-palooza, my in-house geek managed to fix it with a brick and a stick. Not only did he save us an expensive off-hours weekend service call, he has also saved us the cost of a new sump pump, as the brick and stick contraption is still working several weeks later. He confidently says it will go on working like that forever. 

4. Stickin’ it to Big Oil

My geek gave me my very own passive-aggressive way to hurt the big oil companies a little bit. Instead of filling up my empty gas tank in one fell swoop, spending upwards of $50 in a single transaction, my geek suggests filling up more frequently in smaller $20 installments. This is because of the present value of money and the fact that the $50 is worth more to the oil company today than it is a few days from now and BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH. Okay, so I stopped listening at a point, but his hypothesis, even if flawed, makes me feel better and that’s ultimately what counts. 

3. Explosure to Sci-Fi of Yesteryear

I didn’t really comprehend the incredible void in my intellectual and cultural being stemming from the fact that I had never seen the pivotal (apparently) science-fiction cinematic masterpiece “Dune,” but thankfully my geek-husband did. That wrong was recently righted, with a late-night viewing of a surprise DVR recording of the movie he’d captured for me. I know that there are some ladies out there who would have preferred flowers… 

2. The Magical Ability to Maximize

I recently switched from a PC laptop to a MacBook Pro and I’d be lying to you if I said that transition has been entirely smooth. The Pinwheel of Death is a regular visitor to my office and its arrival is typically met with equally as colorful language. Hearing my latest lament about the inability to maximize windows on the Mac as I used to be able to do on the PC, my geek did a bit of geek research and found a free download that, with a set of keystrokes, enables me to maximize. And, my mother still wonders what I see in him.

1. He’s so Good With our Geeklings

Father-son interactions in our house typically include a physics lesson, a Greek myth, a bit of opera and the ever-present chance of a minor explosion. He never says no to the kids when they want to try something new, something that the experts might deem to be age-inappropriate, something that the mother-unit deems to be potentially dangerous. Instead his philosophy is, “they are going to try it anyway when we are not looking, so we might as well teach them to do it the right way.” While other fathers might espouse a similar philosophy, with a geek dad, teaching how to do it the right way includes ensuring the child has an understanding of centrifugal force, the best methods for constructing a lever and the ramifications of mixing acids with bases. Let's just say it's rarely dull.