How not to get yourself invited to a girl geek dinner by me

[terriko]

Crossposted from geek feminism, with some additional commentary at the bottom:

My friend @orenmazor tweeted this:

way to increase visibility for the girl geek dinner by challenging the male geeks to figure out a way in http://is.gd/2Cc3F

The guy in question (Will Armstrong) first talks about how awesome the girl geek dinner will be. Okay, great. Then he whines because as a guy, he's not invited. Okay, less great, but understandable. And then he offers a contest, "with the winner having yours truly as your guest at girl geek dinner and getting a featured blog post on startup ottawa."

Uh, seriously awkward? Insulting? Worst way to ask for a date ever? Over-inflated ego much?

Certainly, I'm not impressed, and if I see this dude at the dinner (I'm hoping no one invites him), I'm going to be seriously tempted to pour a water pitcher over his head. And it's putting me off the startup blog, too, with that "hey, the easiest way for women get on our blog is to pimp themselves to Will" vibe.

So some take home messages here:

1. Woo! We're finally getting a girl geek dinner in Ottawa! Must remember to seriously thank the organizers. I've wanted this for a while, but hadn't had time to organize.
   
2. Please don't invite this dude. Seriously.
   
3. If you want an invite, don't do what he's doing. Ew.
   
4. I have not got plans for inviting a male companion, so if you really want to go, we can talk, but I'm not feeling terribly inclined or charitable at the moment.
   

Comments

[heliumbreath]

I suspect that if we the geeks were actually good at social stuff, finding companionship and not weirding people out and all, we'd be in sales, marketing, or management instead. We're better at dealing with machines, though. With a bit of thought we can figure out what we think we're supposed to do in interpersonal interaction or what might work, but this fellow wouldn't be the first one to badly miscalculate.

[hypatia]

geeks tend to be pretty decent at social stuff when we put the effort into it, i think. it's that we too often think it's not worth /any/ effort, as a community.

Hostile

[(Anonymous)]

From what I've been reading lately, it's not just that many geeks don't think it's important, but that some of them are actively hostile to it/resentful about it, and indeed, view attempts at addressing process and community issues with a chip on their shoulders and some amount of distaste.

I'm kind of at the point that, while I can Pythonate like everyone else these says and made the obligatory attempt at breaking gcc by playing self-referential template games, I'm not really convinced that "geek" is the right term for me. It seems now to carry a connotatoin of simultaneous introversion and egotism. I've got the egotism thing down, but I'm pretty highly extroverted if rather irrationally paranoid about my online ID.

Asad

Meh

[(Anonymous)]

It was just inappropriosity. Unless you think you're God's gift to women---or you're joking/RPing---who in their right mind invites themselves to someone else's dinner as a prize? A lack of social skills doesn't typically manifest itself that way...

Re: Meh

[(Anonymous)]

Me again. No I haven't got around reporting the name thingy as a bug. Aren't developers supposed to read my mind (==the Platonic world of ideal forms) anyway? No? What are they good for then?

Asad

Re: Meh

[heliumbreath]

There's a chance the young fellow actually believes his own PR, at least if he's far far more optimistic than I ever was.

[damned_colonial]

I suspect that if we the geeks were actually good at social stuff, finding companionship and not weirding people out and all, we'd be in sales, marketing, or management instead.

No. You would be a geek with social skills. It does happen, you know. I'm sure you even know some of them, if you think hard enough.

[terriko]

A lot of geeks grow out of the "no social skills" phase, and some of them simply don't notice. ;)

[heliumbreath]

I don't believe I'm entirely bereft of social graces myself, but part of the geek / scientific mindset is always meta-analyzing stuff and digging for underlying structure and reasoning from first principles, and that leads to feeling just a wee bit disconnected. Yes, being more confident would be a good thing, but it can be hard to be natural and go with the flow of a social situation if you keep getting caught trying to quantify the fluid dynamics of it all.

Reported

[(Anonymous)]

I actually finally reported it:

http://www.dreamwidth.org/support/see_request?id=2611

Re: Reported

[(Anonymous)]

And...forgot to sign.

Asad