I'm That Nerd.

August 24, 2003, 07:08 pm

Remember in Sneakers when Robert Redford and friends are trying to break into that fake Toy Company, and they're going through the trash of Dr. Werner Brandes (Mr. “180 IQ” nerd)? And Mary McDonnell's character, upon seeing that he folds his trash, calls him “anal?”

That's me.

I fold my trash so that I have to take it out less frequently.

I pre-sort my clothes when I undress so that I don't have to sort it when I do laundry.

I always put my silverware in the same “quadrant” in the dishwasher, separating knives, spoons, forks, misc., so that putting the silverware away is trivial.

I don't carry coins, instead opting to put all my change in a jar to later be counted and converted into bills by my bank's change-counting machine.

I do all these things because I believe in two very fundamental principals, the first of which is:

Computers are better at some things while people are better at others (think Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations).

Why would I ever try to do something like sorting things numerically or alphabetically, or count things, or search through documents for a particular sequence of letters? Computers are infinitely faster and more accurate at doing these things.

I'm not going to waste my life counting change; I consider it beneath humans to have to do that sort of thing now that an accessible, economic, automated solution has been provided. Plus, things like counting or searching for stuff isn't very fun, which brings me to the second principle:

I enjoy some things more than others.

This is incredibly simple: I enjoy reading, programming, playing videogames, watching movies and playing guitar much more than sorting or counting crap. Why would I waste my valuable time sorting my laundry or searching for and counting out change for a cashier, when I could be playing videogames?

It's really that simple.