Frames of reference

I finally got around to sending the test I linked to a few days ago round the (remains of the) development team at work. Our technical architect also managed to pull the lucky result of Wesley Crusher. His somewhat bemused response to this was: "Who?"

That one person didn't know the character should hardly have come as agreat surprise - Star Trek TNG finished many years past, after all, and I don't expect everyone to have watched it. All well and good... except... except the person sitting opposite me didn't know either. Nor the person sitting on my right. Nor the person sitting on my left. And these are computer programmers. Techies. Geeks. In short, exactly the sort of people who should know obscure facts about Star Trek.

Admittedly, the environment in which I work doesn't suffer from an excess of geekiness (or should that read doesn't suffer an excess of geekiness?). To give you an indication of the state of play, I'm generally considered to be the head geek. Still, it came as a bit of shock. I do have a tendancy to assume that I view matters from the pretty same frame of reference as the rest of the world, despite what is probably a considerable amount evidence to the contrary. Nevertheless, I find that for the majority of the time this appears to work out quite well and the world and I seem to understand each other just about enough to get by. Incidents like this, however, just make me wonder if people actually understand what I'm babbling on about for most for most of the time, or if I'm just being humoured.

It would explain the slightly glazed expressions on their faces...

P.S - After Mija managed to promote herself from Ensign to Captain, I also decided to take the test again. And this time around it transpires that I am... Samwise Gangee.

Some things just are, it appears.