The Nerd Complex: Hierarchies of Nerds

Introduction

One day I was speaking with one of my friends and asked her what her major was. “I’m a bio major,” she replied. “I’m in there with all the nerds.” I began to think about her statement. Doesn’t every major have nerds? I began to see what had happened historically to the population of nerds throughout the ages. In grade school they were the ones that we excluded because they were different from us. In middle school, they helped us with our homework, so they were okay friends, as long as they weren’t friends with us in public. In high school, the nerds found strength lumping into one group, but in college, they slowly evolved into hierarchies of different types of nerds. They specialized in different aspects of the humanities and the sciences and became more and more eccentric in their obsessions. Now they are everywhere, formulating equations, writing reports for fun, and claiming that they invented the internet and the concept of global warming.

Some Nerds Out There

Todd Wilbur is a nerd notorious for using cooking and chemistry to find the secret recipes of restaurants around the nation. He has researched the Coca Cola Company and has found that only three or four top executives, including the Coca Cola chemist, know the secret formula for Coca Cola. They never travel together, and undisclosed precautionary measures have been taken for their utmost safety. When one member of the secret group dies, all others must agree to elect a new individual. The secret yellowing paper with the Coca Cola recipe is deep in a vault in Atlanta, Georgia.
Do you ever think of being a secret agent, but the FBI is too hard to get into? You can work for the Coca Cola Company! You can protect the secret recipe vault, travel with top executives, and carry a gun. Stop being a nerd and do something cool! Your title would be “secret agent protector of the executives that know the Coca Cola secret recipe,” and you can say that every time you pull out your special badge. Make yo mama proud!

Bill Gates

I checked out the official website of Microsoft and found a biography on Bill Gates. Gate’s biography reads much like an obituary when it talks about his past life and reads like a resume for the beginning and end. It is a true testimony to the fact that Bill Gates has been a nerd his entire life, from the time he was thirteen and programming computers to the time he was a student at Harvard. In this biography, I found a passage that filled my soul with glee: “Gates was married on Jan. 1, 1994, to Melinda French Gates.” The writer of this biography had written the sentence using Melinda’s married name, making the writing vague to the point that you can’t tell whether or not Bill Gates married a relative. Unfortunately for me, it was just a vague sentence, and Bill Gates did not marry his relative. But to comfort those who do marry their cousins, Teddy Roosevelt married his fifth cousin. So if you’re looking misty-eyed across the threshold of your family reunion, you are not alone in the world.

You may be a nerd if…

Do you ever wonder about the water that splashes you when you flush a public toilet? Of course everyone wonders about random things, but do you actually research the dangers of secondhand toilet-water splashing? If so, you are a bio nerd. You are one of those people who researches the germs on door handles for fun. Your weekends are filled with mathematical equations and Petri dishes. You have a full life.
Have you ever written a sonnet for someone on Valentine’s Day? Do you recite Shakespeare to prove your point? Do you have wild fantasies about members of the opposite sex that only appear in novels, poems, and other literature? You are an English nerd. You are sadistic and enjoy unhappy endings. You love to argue, and you believe that true love only exists in Jane Austin novels. If you encounter an English nerd, beware. Never get into a discussion involving your favorite movie, for it will soon be reduced to the thematic reproduction of the modernist existential angst of the movie’s putrid producer. If you have no idea what this means, consult the English nerd nearest you.