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Holly Love
Take our quiz to find out how hard-core you are.
You've carved out a career for yourself in IT. To get where you are today -- MIS department, dot-com start-up, incubator, accelerator, Hazzen Pfeffer Inc. -- you may have given up plenty, such as all the time and money it took to earn a technology degree, or your former success as a lawyer, sea captain or couch potato. Now your schedule of eating, drinking and breathing bits and bytes is 24 by 7.
But does any of that truly make you a dyed-in-the-wool IT babe or stud? Don't answer until you take the quiz below, which will definitively determine the depth of your IT devotion. Just grab a piece of that primitive paper and write down whether you agree or disagree with the following statements.
No cheating or "polling-of-newsgroup" lifelines allowed.
Your Work Life
1. You're
exceptionally practiced at saying, "Don't ask me. I didn't write that
module."2. You delight in scaring software beta-testers with error messages like, "Next time you try that you will be demoted to Floppy Disk Recycling Specialist."
3. You're so fed up with recurring network problems that co-workers have caught you in your office several times with Jack Kevorkian setting up to electrocute both you and your network router.
4. To meet a conversion deadline, you can program for nine days straight without food, sleep or feeling guilty for playing games of Tetris to "help strengthen integral thinking patterns."
5. "The miracle of reproduction" to you means finally reproducing a user's chronic application error for debugging at your own workstation.
6. When your non-technical boss requests progress reports, you cleverly answer, "I need another week to recursify the global variable dependence of the secondary interface driver," to get her to give up asking.
7. When asked to produce a system training manual for the sales force, you say, "I'm a lover, not a fighter! No, wait. I mean, I'm a coder, not a writer."
8. On your
lunch break you do things such as visit the Keebler Web site and have 10
cases of Elf Grahams delivered to the really short intranet
consultant.9. When you interview would-be junior analysts, you immediately dismiss any whose resumes have fewer acronyms than a military battle plan.
10. You considered your company's Disney Project a success when the computer-generated kid you created from your own blood, sweat and pixels said, "Mama/Papa, I want to be a real-time boy."
11. You're
blacklisted at four recruiting firms for hacking into their systems and
permanently translating every Microsoft Word resume into Javanese.
12. You're highly sought-after by 10 other recruiting firms for the same reason.
13. After 14-hour days of staring unblinkingly at computer screens, you finally admitted at your intervention, "My name is Pat, and, yes, I am a Visine junkie."
14. To you, being "master of your domain" means having sole
authority in choosing your employer's Web-site address. 15. You have given up starched shirts, Bombay Sapphire martinis and Golf Digest in favor of loose jeans, Starbucks caffeine and Wired.
Your
Friends, Romance and Family1. When friends ring your doorbell, they're greeted by the MIDI barking of VirtualRover.Com, your cyberdog prototype.
2. To relax, you and friends like to kick back, grab a six-pack of Zima and contemplate the 3-tier architecture and middleware challenges of Sybase development tools.
3. Your aspirin supply is completely drained every Wednesday night when your buddy who works for Microsoft comes over to play Monopoly and winds up with a "splitting" headache.
4. Your favorite pick up line is, "How'd you like to come over to my cubicle and choose the primary keys for my relational database?"
5. The highlight of the last bachelor/bachelorette party you planned was a hired Oracle developer with extremely attractive event triggers.
6. When you informed friends that you and your spouse had a baby, they said, "Congratulations! So is little ASCII a 1 or a 0?"
7. You've been seeing a counselor for years to resolve the parenting issue of your interfaith marriage: "Do we raise them on PC or Macintosh?"
8. When
explaining the facts of life to your kids, you say that creating another
human life requires one female and one e-male9. Last Christmas/Hannukah, you gave each family member the gift that keeps on giving, a Y2K PC tune up.
And More... 1. You keep searching bookstores for the latest edition of Merriam Webmaster's Collegiate Dictionary. 2. You were relieved when a "Germ Warfare" headline referred not to e-mail viruses, but merely to lame old Anthrax.
3. Your favorite television show is "This Old Computer."
4. Your favorite book is Fire Wire in the Belly.
5. Your favorite folder is "Favorites."
6. If your house caught on fire, you'd abandon your hamster and instead grab the vacuum tube from ENIAC that you outbid Stephen Hawking for at auction.
7. On a citizenship form asking your native language, you wrote, "Cut teeth on COBOL. Now grind them over Visual C++."
8. You donate vast sums of money to the most
critically needy group of the 21st century, the computer
illiterate.9. You dream in color -- glorious, 32-bit /1024 by 768 resolution color.
10. You are able, without help, without crying and without taking Bill Gates' name in vain, to correctly program a VCR.
Scoring
And now to tally the results. Count your number of "agrees." If you have:
0-11. Get out of IT now. You should have been an ice dancer.
12-33. You're on your way to becoming a true techie, but you've got to try harder.
A perfect 34. Congratulations! Your devotion is unparalleled. What Martin Luther King was to civil rights, what Jonas Salk was to medicine, you are to IT. Others throughout the country are dying to meet you, to learn from your teachings, to kiss the ground upon which you walk.
So what are you waiting for? You have an obligation to society! You must immediately pack your bags, bid farewell to your loved ones and start driving, to the nearest psychiatric hospital, of course.
Holly Love is a writer in Havertown.