As a geek I have an appreciation for the versatile: the Swiss army knife; the command line terminal emulator; the roll of duct tape.
I also have a fetish for the simple object ruthlessly made perfect for a single purpose. My new Sigg bottle is precision-engineered to carry liquid. That’s all it does. It doesn’t attempt to thermally isolate it. It doesn’t leak and it doesn’t impart any taste. (I bought the bottle for carrying water with me while commuting on the hot, cramped tube, in the hope that it might eventually save me money on buying expensive bottled water. Efficiency: another geek goal.)
Sigg bottles are available with some fairly fashionable designs, but mine is black. Why black, when I could choose from a myriad colours and patterns? It’s not that I don’t appreciate beautiful things. (If my girlfriend is reading this, you alone are proof of that!)
What started as me wondering about this turned into a revelation about what means to be a geek. As a geek I see beauty in function as well as form—and there is more beauty in the unadulterated functionality of the Sigg bottle than there could be in its exterior form.
Entries (RSS)