I know that comes as a big shock to everybody, since geeks in general are seen as the crème de la crème of society, and the common perception is that we live the life of rock-stars and party all night with all the other glamorous people.
Not so.
I sit in my office (which used to be in the basement, now it's a room above the garage), usually in my ratty bathrobe, reading and writing email all day. And a lot of wasting time while waiting for people to answer or just report problems. I go to bed at ten, and wake up at seven to get the kids to school. And then it all repeats.
So not glamorous. When I actually write code (which is usually in the mail reader these days - mostly telling people "do it like this" rather than actually writing real code), that's about the most exciting part of the day.
But then, once in a while, I get to live the high life. This weekend, we got invited to the Night Before Oscar party (thanks Renée and Doug!) because sometimes the companies I work with apparently think that I need to get a night out.
Toto, I don't think we're talking white-socks-and-sandals any more.
So me and the wife were completely out of our depth, and knew absolutely nobody. We go out for a date night every week, so we a fair number of movies, but we really aren't movie people - the kinds of movies we go to don't make a huge impression. So there we were, cram-packed with celebrities, not remembering names or faces.
The good news was, that as Tove said, there was no real downside. Nobody knew us, and nobody would ever remember us the next day. So we could go whole retard quite openly, and brazenly just ask people "You look really familiar, who are you?". Which we did. With some discreet google image searches when we could guess, and just wanted to verify it ("John Cusack or Paul Rudd?").
Everybody seemed to take it in good cheer. We interrupted David Spade chatting up Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis (that's what Tove says, I was oblivious - it's those famous geek social graces again. I told her I'm sure I'd have noticed Natalie Portman and that she can't possibly have been there, but whatever), and Tove pissed off Warren Beatty by asking his name not just once, but twice.
So here's a shout-out to my new BFF's Jon Hamm and DJ.
We probably won't be invited again. But we have pictures for the kids, to prove to them that their parents are cool people.
