#20 – Embrace thy inner nerd…
Photo by Kwasi Kyei Mensah Jnr from Pexels
As many of you probably do on your daily commute, I often accept one of the free newspapers that are thrust before me when entering the train station. I’ll spend 10 minutes flicking over the headlines before heading to the ‘Business’ section at the back, pretend that the value of the FTSE100 has any real meaning to me and then get straight back into Netflix – it’s a type of daily ritual.
Very occasionally a headline will pique my interest; once you’ve passed the endless stories on Brexit and the latest Royal Family dispute you may sometimes find something you want to read, not always. A few weeks ago, one of the small bottom corner stories was this:
Mensa Doctor: Let’s ban ‘nerd’ as hate speech.
Words such as ‘nerd’ and ‘geek’ should be outlawed to protect people with high IQ’s, according to a leading academic.
The list of things we can no longer say is increasingly pathetic; ‘generation snowflake’ really need to get a grip of themselves – I’m in their age bracket, roughly, yet I still can’t understand the fuss being made about absolutely everything. This story right here, claimed by a ‘leading academic’, is ludicrous. I’ve touched on ‘academics’ before (see post #6), I’d define a lot of them as this:
Individuals, usually quite intelligent, that are full of wonderful theory but lack any real-world knowledge, experience or skill. People that sit secluded in a sterile type environment ‘solving’ problems that don’t exist for people that didn’t ask them to.
Of course I’m generalising, academia certainly has it’s place, but articles such as this one really discredit that title – maybe we should outlaw the term Academic as well?!
Instead of sitting around sulking because ‘somebody called you a name’, embrace exactly what you are; you’re an adult, you should be able to shrug some things off by now. I don’t for one moment condone any form of actual hate speech, or bullying, these things have absolutely no place in our society. But, is everything going to be labelled as hate speech? Are these words really that insulting? I don’t think so at all, in my experience they’re being used as the opposite…
When it comes to the world of BIM, I can safely say that the nerdiness is potent. We’re all a bit nerdy, a bit geeky, a bit techy and usually pretty anal about most things too (but that’s a different subject). Most importantly though, we’re self-proclaimed nerds. I, as well as many other BIM individuals that I know, will refer to themselves as a nerd or similar several times per week. It’s not an insult, we’re not sitting around waiting for others to tell us that we’re being nerdy, we’re embracing it in all its glory.
I’ve started many conversations with “I’ve been a bit geeky here…” or “I’ve gone full nerd on this…”, usually when I’ve put the time and effort to crack something technical. I’m not insulting myself; I’m actually standing there proud of a technical, albeit usually fairly insignificant, triumph. It may have only been a tricky Excel formula or a new Revit solution for a niggling issue, either way I’m wholeheartedly accepting my inner nerd. In BIM we all need a certain level of this, we need to have that technical eye for detail and the desire to sit and play with something digitally fiddly for hours on end until we get it right. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, it’s who we are and it’s quite often why we’re good at BIM.
I’d say that, especially for the BIM wizards, it’s becoming a badge of honour; quite often we’re trying to out-geek one another. So, will they outlaw all of us? Will we be jailed for self-hate speech? Will the geek-police shut us all down?
Do us all a favour, ‘Academics’, go and research something actually useful – we BIM’ers are far too busy for your nerd prison.
Agree or disagree, the comments are open below.
Mr. Smith
smith@dbe.careers
