Beautiful Princess Meets the Geeks

A Heavy-Handed Fairy Tale for Modern Times

Once upon a somewhat enlightened time, there lived a beautiful princess. Given the enlightenment of the time, this princess did not spend all day preening in front of a mirror, awaiting the evening ball where Prince Charming - drunk as usual - would sweep her off her feet. No, this beautiful princess was spending her days - and a few too many evenings she noted - finishing up her computer science degree. For she was not only a beautiful princess but a wise one as well.

One day the princess was on her way to an interview for what looked to be an excellent job; it was with an innovative systems analysis company who was looking for someone able to work with clients effectively and then come up with a set of requirements and systems design that could be then passed over to the programmers in the coding pits. It seemed ideal to the princess, letting her put to work both her considerable technical and communications skills.

The princess was running late for the interview, so decided to take a shortcut. This shortcut she had in mind ran through Geek Forest. She'd heard rumours of strange goings-on in the Forest, but decided that since it was the middle of the day there wouldn't be much cause for concern. Besides, she'd be late if she didn't take the shortcut!

So she set off into Geek Forest, thoughts rushing ahead to the interview. Getting absorbed in remembering details of the company, she failed to notice that the forest seemed... well, somewhat dirty and covered in a layer of grime. After almost tripping on several pop cans, she began to be more aware of her surroundings, the slight buzzing in the air. It all seemed very unnatural somehow, particularly for a forest.

Walking along a bit more hurriedly, a number of times she glimpsed strange figures some distance off the path, scurrying around or climbing in the trees. The strange thing about these figures, is they all seemed heavily weighted down. She finally realized they all seemed to have a large number of items clipped to their belts; knives, bottle openers, PDAs, cellular phones, Unix manuals, huge sets of keys and more. And every item carefully packaged in a leather case that just screamed out at you "just ask me what this thing is.. please, someone just ask me!"

Somewhat disconcerted, the princess wandered on. These creatures certainly appeared harmless anyway. Suddenly the path she was on opened up into a large clearing. She gasped as she saw what the clearing contained.

In front of her, was a man of some sort. Very tall and lanky, apparently unfamiliar with basic elements of personal hygiene. His visage was frightening. Strewn around were computers of all sorts, bookcases filled with dusty, unopened books and manuals, outdated third-hand posters detailing the "newest" punch card readers afixed to trees. And everywhere - everywhere! - were layers upon layers of empty slurpee cups.

"Bow down before me, you worthless piece of non-silicon" bellowed the man/monster in the clearing, "for I am the system administrator of Geek Forest. All who deign to pass must first be harassed and made to feel humiliated by my clearly superior intellect. Doesn't look like it'll take too long for you, what are you, some sort of housekeeper or waitress or some other useless thing little missy?"

The princess was shocked by such an outrageous outburst, but did notice the characteristically sloping forehead. "Sigh" she thought to herself, "another simian who's never considered that women have brains." "No" she said aloud, "actually I'm a computer scientist, just on my way to another job interview."

At this the creature laughed mightily, intermixed with some loud belching noises. "As if people like you are so qualified, and yet I can never find a job except as a downtrodden sysadmin. Baaah!". The tirade continued on a for several minutes; the princess noted that this would make an interesting study for her friend in anthropology.

"Alright" the creature finally uttered, "if you think you're so smart, you're going to have to prove it to get past this clearing". The princess noticed the slurpee cups were alive and had moved so as to wall her in. "Here is a list of twenty really important questions which any self-respecting computer scientist would obviously have committed to memory. In fact, I use some of these to amaze people at parties". "Check one up on the social skills department," the princess muttered to herself. The sysadmin continued, "answer these before I return from sev and you will be allowed to continue on." With that, he departed, leaving the slurpee cups to threaten her.

She glanced at the paper. "On a micro-sparc, what instruction does opcode $3c correspond to?" "What does pin 3 on a 68010 processor do?" "Explain how you can exploit the really neat bug in gcc version 2.135.543.12/ax to shave 2 microseconds off any program using only logical negation and left shift instructions." And so on. Her head spun at the sheer uselessness of it all.

However, she did have to get to that interview. She walked over to the bookshelf, dusted off a couple of the most arcane books, cracked the spines and flipped to the index. Five minutes later she was done, and waited patiently for the system administrator to return.

When he returned, flushed with brain freeze, she handed him the paper. As he scanned through it, he became more and more red. "How could you get these all correct, you worthless creature?" he fumed. "It took me ages to memorize these all!"

"I just looked them up in your rather dusty books" she replied.

"Looked them up???" he exploded. "Everyone knows you're supposed to memorize things like this! The books sit on the shelf just so you can impress everyone with how much you know so that you look really cool. You're not supposed to actually look at them!!! You'll never make it as a real computer scientist. Pfah! You're not worth my time. Begone!"

Shaking her head, she left the clearing, the slurpee cups opening up before her. "Funny, you'd think they only hire those at the university" she thought to herself. Hurrying down the path, she thought for a moment of corraling one of those monkey creatures still in the trees and borrowing their cell phones so she could call ahead to the person interviewing her to say she'd be a few minutes late. But she realized that would involve listening to the monkey tell her in a condescending tone exactly how cool that particular model of phone - brand new of course - was and how he would show her step by step. Instead, she hurried along faster.

She was stopped along the trail by a rather disheveled fellow, who seemed lost and uncertain. She asked if he was okay, and he responded "oh yes, just fine. Fine as could be. Well, actually no not really. Pretty crummy actually. Just trying to get this bug out of my program and its awfully difficult. See?" He whipped out a commodore 64 from his backpack and proceeded to show the princess the problem. When he fired it up, she was accosted by a huge display of random clutter, weird abbreviations, and this annoying blinking text everywhere.

"What is it supposed to do?" she asked. "Well, this company I work for has this training package for new users, you know to show them how easy computers are and stuff. But it doesn't even show them how to use the DOS assembler or anything. Some training program! So I decided that I'd take it upon myself to rewrite their training program. And of course I had to do it in the World Wide Web, because its just the culest thing around you know? Now admittedly, porting Netscape onto my c64 took a bit of work, but its really nifty now and I can add all kinds of really cule features. I can't wait till Marc Andreesen names me cool site of the day. So do you think I should abbreviate the DOS assembler item as 'asm' or 'gas'? And look, if you hold down ctl-opt-shift-x it shows a picture of my dental records from when i was three."

Of course, by this time the princess was long gone down the trail.

She was making good progress, all things considered, when the path again opened up. Looking ahead, she saw what appeared to be a maze of office cubicles in the middle of Geek Forest! The six foot walls were spread out all over, at weird angles. And scurrying around through the maze were hunched over programmers; or at least she assumed they were programmers looking at all the cans of coke and discarded printouts.

One of the programmers came up to her and explained. "We've been trapped in here forever, in this awful maze, trying to get through. But I think we're getting somewhere. One of these fellows was a hardware tech, and he's constructed a computer out of tree bark and we wrote a program to help find our way out. Its been searching for a month already - you can't run a tree bark computer too fast or it catches on fire - so I'm sure we'll find our way out soon."

The princess sighed, and climbed on a desk inside one of the cubicles so she could look over the sea of half-walls. Spotting the path through, she quickly traversed the maze to the other side. The programmers followed her through in awe. "How did you think of doing that, just standing up and looking over the walls?" they asked in hushed voices. "Just a little bit of problem solving" she replied. They looked confused. "Think of it as a breadth-first rather than depth-first search" she continued, and they all looked enlightened. There was a small footbridge going over a creek that she went across and continued on.

Looking back she noticed all of the programmers still on the far side of the creek. She shouted "what are you waiting for?". One of them called back "just trying to figure out the right order for us all to get across. But I think we came up with a good algorithm for deciding that. It shouldn't take too long to figure out how to reprogram our tree bark computer to give us the answer."

The princess turned again towards the path and ran on through Geek Forest. Eventually the trees began to thin out and she could see more sunlight ahead. As she approached the edge of the forest, a wizened old man stepped towards her. The princess was strangely relieved to find the old man did not seem to be carrying the slightest piece of high-tech equipment with him.

"I am the caretaker of Geek Forest" the old man announced. "I'm sorry if some of the denizens accosted you on your journey. I was away on a business trip and had to hurry back when I'd heard you'd crossed into the Forest. They really are quite harmless you know, those pathetic creatures. We have to keep them here though, it keeps them away from the productive members of society; I'm afraid they just don't deal with real people very well. But they all seem quite happy here, well except the sysadmin fellow, but I think thats he's just happy being unhappy. But we give them all they want, lots of coke, electricity and the freedom to work on any useless project they feel like. Its not like any of them really want to leave."

The princess smiled, thanked the kindly old man, and continued on to her job interview. "Now I know what happened to them all" she thought, and the day seemed brighter than it had ever been before.