Last night among all the writing and coding I found myself doing, I also found time to browse through some of the blogs my friends write, and noticed that good friend Betsy had taken some time from her busy schedule to take a few of those personality-type quizzes. Now seeing as how Betsy is a real smart cookie, I assumed that she wouldn’t waste her time on frivolous and fruitless acts, so I followed suit, though taking such quizzes is usually against my character. What can I say? When you’re in desperate need of blog content, you’re willing to try anything.

The test I took asked a very simple question: Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Sixty questions later and I had a very unexpected answer: none of the above — “Joe Average”, as they had termed it.

Now it took me a long time to come to grips with it, but I had proudly considered myself a geek. Now I had fallen back into the mob of the average? This knocked me for a loop (though a rather small one, I should state). But I was too tired to finish my write-up, so I copied and pasted the results, made a few witty notes and saved the draft to finish up tonight.

When I tried to load the draft over my lunch break, I found the quirky post title, but nothing else remained. My average test results were gone — lost to the digital ether. Now had I any real sense, I would have just dropped the subject and moved onto another topic worth writing about, but that quiz stuck in my craw to the point where I wasted another five minutes answering questions, all in an attempt to duplicate my results. But the law of averages held, and there was no way my answers were going to be exactly the same. So without any malice on my part, my re-tested results:

43 % Nerd, 52% Geek, 21% Dork

This makes me a “Pure Geek”, as the test results claim. My geekdom is restored! But Wouldn’t I need to take the test a third time to get a statistically stable sampling? Well, I spent at least 10 minutes taking the same test twice, and at least 20 minutes over two evenings writing about the process. By my admittedly poor math, that’s 30 minutes of my life that could have been spent on much nobler endeavors that I’m never getting back. If that doesn’t reinforce my status as a geek, nothing will.

And that’s how I learned to never take another time-wasting personality quiz again.

Tags: Personal

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 17th, 2007 at 11:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.