Like I need more work...

ATomasino

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Jan 12, 2006
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Ok most of you are just getting to recognize my name around etc... But I've recently realized that I'm in a quasi unique position and am interested to see if anyone else is in a similar position.

I'm an Account Supervisor in an advertising agency in NYC and my client is a large pharamaceutical company. I set that up to explain that I spend way too much of my time in the corporate world. Add onto that that the majority of my co-workers are female. Long and short of it, not a gigantic gaming crowd there. Of late especially i''ve realized that I have two totally different vocabularies. Marketing / business terms, and gaming terms, and narry do the two mix. For instance I called my co-worker a noob the other day and they looked at me as if I had used a foreign language.

Long post for a short question, does anyone else find themselves in a similar position where your work / personal life are drastically different from your gaming life? The general culture's view of gaming is fascinating to me and recently I have wanted to delve into it a bit. Hence the work reference in my thread title. I work a bunch and still need to do a bunch of media updating to the site so it isn't like I need to add a column or diatrab into it. Just looking at the whole situation as a researcher of sorts and wondering who is a curious in the same areas as I am.

Damn that was a long thread. Back to work.
 
My wife just calls me a geek and moves on.....But seriously, i have had the same things happen to me before.....In my previous job, you didn't find many 30 year olds that were gamers....Most just played them with their kids.....And yeah, i got caught more than a few times having my co-workers look at me, with blank faces, when i started talking about gaming.....The general public's one statement is "i have no time for games anymore".....What??!!??.......I think it's their lack of challenging their brain, more like it......I can hang with the big boys when it comes to intellectual conversation, but sometimes you wanna just say "You Got Owned!!!"....hahaha......sorry, but i have had many instances where i have thought about it
 
I think it is a culture clash. Some of us are on the tip of the new wave of a generation. We are 30-ish and grew up with GI Joe just as much as we did Mario, Sonic, and Mega Man. It is still apart of our lives. Move 7-10 years into the 40-ish age group and you'll find less gamers. I work with the youth at my church and even the cheerleaders understand what a noob is.

Then there's a distinction between those of us who swim in the ocean of the digital realm and those who merely surf their digital TV channels. Personally, I find most TV boring. I'm ADD and always need to DO something. A show has to be really interesting to me before I'll turn off the 360. Heck, I'll pick up a good book before I'll watch American Idol. My parents turn on the TV as soon as they get in and it stays on until they go to bed. I can't do that unless it's a game.
 
I can't complain about it. I've made a great friend at one place I work at because of our net-nerdiness.

Also my love of gamings and other such geek-love is landing me a gig at the local newspaper with a blog/column writing on it. So really, being unique is a bonus for me.

I say embrace it, don't hide it. Be cool and try to turn it around for the sake of humour. People will want to talk to you, get some ideas for gifts/whatever. AND if upper-management sees that you have a unique and creative interest (especially for an advertising company?) they could be interested in tapping that.
 
Well I work at a computer company so its a little more frequent to stumble across computer geeks, which if you are a computer geek you most definatly play video games. I don't particulary talk to many of them, but I do know they are around.
 
Very Nice Article on your topic man.....for those that haven't read it...It is on the front page, in the features section...See if you can relate...
 
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Even though I work in an internet banking company in a technical role (Product Management) I still have my "gaming vocab" and my "work vocab". Almost nobody is a gamer, even though everyone here are geeks. I feel your pain, although in my case at least I've finally got my wife to embrace the Dark SIde and start playing with me, first with MMOs like City of Heroes and now with World of Warcrafti
 
I'm with Electronic Banking Services. We use Checkfree as our bill pay support. Basically, when a credit union or bank doesn't want to buy all the equipment and train Aunt Martha to provide support online banking (and EVERY bank wants online banking now), they use us. We setup our site, make it look like theirs, add their icons, and then they can show their balances. In most cases they have bill payment too.

One of the other products is the stripped down model where we offer a generic Checkfree bill payment service. We send our payment investigations on to Checkfree, though.
 
We're actually a seperate company, but we do primary support for Checkfree. Clients call us, and we call Checkfree. Most of the people I've ever had to deal with are complete idiots. Of course, I don't deal with the good ones, because they do their job well and there are no problems with them.
 
When I started dating my current girlfriend I let slip the work "leet" when I saw something cool happen at a basketball game. She looked at me with her brow furrowed and her nose scrunched up as if to say "What?" So I had to explain to her not only what it meant but why I know this and how it affects my everyday life- "Yes Vanessa," I said, "I am a gamer."

It took her awhile to warm up to the fact that I spent a lot of my free time in CS servers and planning strats for BF maps. It wasn't until I showed her World of Warcraft (and trust me when I say this is a girl who hadn't played a PC game beyond Spider Soliatre) that she discovered the same love for games that I have.

Just 15 minutes ago I received a text from her on my phone. She is the middle of a business meeting and this is what she sent:

"Before the exp (The new WOW expansion pack) I need to make the rig 1337. ZOMG LOL!"

She was a cheerleader in High School.


Sometimes nerdiness can rub off :)