Rands in Repose has a fan­tas­tic arti­cle that every lover of nerds should read. The Nerd Hand­book is an elo­quent state­ment about the inner work­ings of every nerd.

He sees the world as a system which, given enough time and effort, is com­pletely know­able. This is a frag­ile illu­sion that your nerd has adopted, but it’s a pleas­ant one that gets your nerd through the day.

My quest for knowl­edge, actu­ally to know every­thing, is an exhaust­ing pur­suit. In fact, I find it so exhaust­ing that some­times I am inca­pable of actu­ally learn­ing any­thing. Luck­ily this only hap­pens in short phases.

Your nerd has con­trol issues.

While I take issues with the par­tic­u­lar exam­ples illus­trated here, in gen­eral, agreed.

Your nerd has built him­self a cave.

Ah…The Cave. Oh how I love my cave. Actu­ally, when I was in high school I moved from my per­fectly normal bed­room into the barely fin­ished base­ment room and began build­ing my lair. My family affec­tion­ately referred to it as my cave.

Each object in the Cave has a par­tic­u­lar place and pur­pose. Even the clut­ter is well designed. Don’t believe me? Grab that seem­ingly dis­carded Mac Mini which has been sit­ting on the floor for two months and hide it. You’ll have 10 min­utes before he’ll come stomp­ing out of the Cave — “Where’s the Mac?”

I have this ridicu­lous talent of “remembering” where things are placed in a room (espe­cially one that I spend a lot of time in). This doesn’t actu­ally have any­thing to do with the state of order or clean­li­ness of the place in ques­tion. I just know that things were moved.

A couple of years ago my apart­ment was broken into. Barely any­thing was stolen and very little even actu­ally touched. The cra­zi­est part about the whole thing, was that I was able to walk through the entire house and point out every­thing single thing that the thief touched or looked through. I could tell which rooms he walked into, and which ones he didn’t. I was able to piece together the entire robbery.

He climbed in through the bed­room window. Rum­maged through my girlfriend’s jew­elry boxes and dresser, but did not take any­thing (appar­ently semi-​precious stones weren’t impor­tant.) He moved my night-​stand and bed slightly away from the wall in order to unplug and steal my alarm clock. I got it for $15 at K-Mart. He then pro­ceeded directly through the dining room and into the living room. There was a lot stuff worth steal­ing in the dining room, but he never looked at that. In the living room he imme­di­ately went for the PS2. He tried taking the NES there but decided that it wasn’t worth it when he real­ized he would have to unscrew two coax­ial cables to get it out. He looked at Tommy Boy, but then decided against steal­ing it. Super Mario Broth­ers 1 was fair game though. At this point some noise must have scared him because he tried to leave out the front door but then decided not to (he left the door unlocked). Instead he went out the back­door, con­ve­niently grab­bing my back­pack from the chair next to the door to stash his goods in. He never set foot into my office. I really lucked out in this regard, because all of my PS2 games were in that room (not with the actual PS2).

I was able to estab­lish this entire story by simply look­ing around my apart­ment. I know when things are moved.

It’s another juicy cliché to say that nerds love video games, but that’s not what they love. A video game is just one more system where your nerd’s job is to figure out the rules that define it, which will enable him to beat it.

Don’t get me started on my obses­sive need for cre­at­ing per­fec­tion in RPG games.

Humor is an intel­lec­tual puzzle, “How can this par­tic­u­lar set of eso­teric trivia be con­structed to max­i­mize hilar­ity as quickly as possible?” Your nerd lis­tens hard to rec­og­nize humor poten­tial and when he hears it, he furi­ously scours his mind to find rel­e­vant con­tent from his expe­ri­ence so he can get the funny out as quickly as possible.

Last week I was walk­ing through the hall­way of one of my friends house when her room­mate jumped out of his bed­room and blocked my path. He demanded I pay a $1 toll to pass him. I racked my brain quickly trying to think of some­thing witty to say. When noth­ing would come out, I sighed and gave him a dollar. I didn’t give him a dollar because I needed to, but because I deserved to lose that dollar for not being able to think of a single witty thing to say. I lost the game.

If you trip the irrel­e­vance flag, look for verbal punc­tu­a­tion announc­ing his judg­ment of irrel­e­vance. It’s the word your nerd says when he’s not lis­ten­ing and it’s always the same. My word is “Cool”, and when you hear “Cool”, I’m not listening.

I’m not actu­ally sure what my word is, but I’m cer­tain that I have one.

Small talk. Those first awk­ward five min­utes when two people are forced to inter­act. Small talk is the bane of the nerd’s exis­tence because small talk is a com­bi­na­tion of aspects of the world that your nerd hates. When your nerd is star­ing at a stranger, all he’s think­ing is, “I have no system for under­stand­ing this messy person in front of me”.

Not to men­tion the fact that small talk is actu­ally by def­i­n­i­tion trip­ping the “irrelevance flag.”

You might’ve noticed your nerd’s strange rela­tion to food. Does he eat fast? Like really fast?

This part just made me laugh. I eat incred­i­bly fast.

Go read the whole arti­cle if you haven’t already. It’s well worth it.