Back in the seventies, a boy called Tommy was born.
Not a very common name in Denmark and not a name – as you might think – chosen to honor the English soldiers who freed Europe in the second world war, nor because of the great musical by the same name made by The Who.
No, the name was chosen by his big sister and she had picked the name from a television series for children in which an extremely strong red-haired girl was the main character.
The name of the girl was Pippi and she was at the time a very popular character among children, first in books and then on television.
Pippi was the geeky girl left all alone to herself in a huge old house and she ran into a lot of trouble or made the trouble herself. She always came out at the good end though because she had superpowers and was good to come up with new solutions that ordinary people would fail to see.
Tommy was the oh-so-nice and never misbehaving neighbour of Pippi and was always dragged into new adventures by the naughty girl next door 
Anyway, name aside, his childhood was rather happy but he felt a bit outside all the time.
He never liked the stuff that most kids do. He didn’t go to soccer, just because the rest of the boys in the class did.
He didn’t save every penny he had to get that motorbike that all the other boys wanted.
And he didn’t mix in with everyone else, even if it was what was expected of a “normal” boy to do….
So what did he do ?
He got a computer when he was 12. Started playing games on it but also did a lot of coding.
He bought strange German magazines with loads of pages containing machine code in hexidecimal to type in by hand and spend hours on end to type in the correct codes to see the outcome of all this code put into the computer by his hard work.
This hard task to make computers do “stuff” and finding the reward in that itself, is what led Tommy to be a geek.
And whatever he did as a grown-up, the effect of typing stuff into a computer and seeing the results of that work, always gave him a kick – even when it was “just” HTML coming out as web pages.
The magic would never disappear. A new “Hello world” sample in a new language, tool or IDE, the effect would always be “YES, I did it – that worked and felt great!”.
A new problem to solve that several people have failed to get cracked, leaving it all up to you – the geek. And you do it, you find that solution, that hidden button, setting or missing data and you save the day for tens, hundreds or thousands of people.
It takes skill, it takes talent – and, it can’t be taught!
Geek is for life, and it’s about life.
Welcome to the Geekhouse. Made by geeks, for geeks.
