You know you're a geek when...

Let me set the scene. It's a Tuesday night. It's been a long day. The dishes are done, the washing is folded, the rubbish is out. Now, it's 11:30, and there's just a couple more things to do before turning out the lights for the night. One of them is checking in to see what you've missed on Twitter while you've been busily talking to your mother to find out the best way to attach curtain tape to curtains (desperate times, desperate measures; cash in hand employment is always welcome!). Another involves plugging in your various techno toys so they're all charged up and ready to go in the morning; this takes at least 3 power cords every night. And finally, you update your blog, because you check your visitor stats and suddenly there's a spike that's threatening to enter double figures and you're worried that if you don't capitalise on the traffic that's being fed to you from your friend's far more popular site (check it out, by the way... http://www.treadonme.co.uk/. Well worth the look), you'll miss out on the chance of ever building an audience. And then it hits you.

You're a geek. A certified, paid up member of the chess club. You may not have spent your lunchtimes getting your head flushed in the toilets - after all, refined girls schools don't go in for that sort of thing - but somewhere along the line you became a card carrying nerd.

How, you ask yourself. How did this happen to me? I don't generally require glasses - only when I'm really tired! I work in design, for crying out loud, and only own 2 cardigans - the uber trendy ones that ... Uber trendy? Cardigan? Designer? Oh dear god. The light clicks on in a spark of inspiration. You know when it started. Back at that school for refined young ladies, the geeks were among the first to discover the true use of the internet. Way back in 1995, it was the chat room, the place where you would chat away to people all over the world, blissfully unaware of the fact that they were potentially priming you for something potentially illegal. Then it was ICQ, where the sexual innuendo was a little less innuendo and a little more in your face instead, but you could still chat away to people quite merrily without necessarily knowing who the hell they were in the real world. MSN, Facebook, Twitter, blogs. Things you're familiar with even if you don't know how to write programming code (you're a geek yes, but you're not yet one of the kings of geeks. You leave that to your friends. By the way, Jones, can you show me how to do the whole click-a-word-link thing? Ta...)

Somewhere along the way, you became hooked. Back when your school friend would talk to her computer, threatening it with all sorts of dire threats if it didn't speed up to its full 28.8kbps potential ("if you don't hurry up I'll tell you how much I love Stephen") you and your friends slid sideways into the world of geek. You became Eugene from Grease, instead of the Rizzo that you always thought you could have been. And you know you're a geek when your knowledge of your friends lives comes not from hearing their voices tell you, or seeing it with your own eyes, but from reading tweets and status updates.

Hi everyone. My name is Killi, and I'm a geek. It has been around 24 hours since my last tweet.