King of the Geeks

One of the perils of the tech industry is a little game of one-upsmanship that I call "King of the Geeks." Usually it's a friendly game, but sometimes it is a stupid battle of egos. I had an amusing example of it today while I was talking to a tech on the phone. I mentioned an ancient product, and made an offhand remark that it was from the early 80s and probably before his time. He responded, "oh I remember that product, I started programming back in the days of the VIC-20."
I said, "oh, two can play that game, I like this game, I usually win." I told him that my computer store sold VIC-20s, but I started long before that. I trumped his VIC-20 with my experience in IBM punch card sorters. He responded with his experience programming patchboard computers. Now that is old tech, the stuff they were replacing as obsolete when I started computing. I still could have won the game, but I did not play my ace-in-the-hole, the card that always beats everyone, the Digicomp 1.

The Digicomp 1 was my first computer, I bought one by mail order from Edmund Scientific when I was just a little kid, this must have been around 1963. So you have to go back a long LONG ways to beat me when you're playing King of the Geeks.. One reason I find this game so distasteful is that I used to encounter it almost daily when I worked as a salesman at ComputerLand in Los Angeles. Some customers would take pleasure in tripping up the salesmen and trying to prove they were smarter and knew more about computers than the sales rep. I found an article in a sales magazine that described this game, and said that the winning sales strategy is to let the geek win the game, it specifically said to use the phrase, "I defer to your obvious technical expertise in this area." The strategy is twofold. If you're trying to sell a computer, you want to seem knowledgeable, but if you win the game, you'll just offend the customer and he won't buy anything. If you cave in and admit defeat, the geek gets what he wants: ego strokes. But that's the second part of the strategy, by caving in so easily, the geek has a hollow victory, which he'll probably not catch on to immediately. It will bug him later.
So that is why I try to not even play this game. Sometimes I get swept up in it, then I always let the other geek win. But I make it a tough victory for them, so they get their ego strokes from defeating a worthy opponent.