This week I was faced with two counts of “whoosh”-over-the-head moments. First was when I was trying to explain to my friend that the streaming HD movie sometimes had a bandwidth requirement that WiFi failed to provide. The next was when I mentioned to my roomie’s sister that I got Prestige in Blu-ray.
This got me thinking. I’ve hit such a weird level of geekdom that I have forgotten that the world is not keeping up with all the techno-marvels the moment that they are coming out. Back in the day it took me about 4 years before getting in line with DVD, and now a mere 18 months later I have Blu-ray discs. Though I have to claim that owning Blu-ray had little to do with Blu-ray itself, but I digress.
Most of the people around me these days keep up with the latest. At best they have fallen behind for a month or so. Words like gigabytes, megabits per second, full-HD, etc. have become so common place that I forget that one might not be able to comprehend how big a 1GB file could be. Which in turn points to how I fail to realize what I geek I actually am sometimes.
Lesson learned. Next time I’ll know better.
In the long run really successful technologists are those that learn to design for average people. The techno-elite is a thin sliver of society. Although I am no where near as knowledgeable as you are on the details of hardware and software, I still have to constantly remind myself that that the average joe is lightyears behind even that.
Its also a bigger struggle because I (like you) am genuinely passionate about technology. I love it. So in casual conversation its easy to trample over other people without realizing that not everyone shares those passions.