I'm a little surprised by all your upvotes for this comment. I spend at least as much -- and maybe more -- time with car mechanics, natural gas technicians, sec

I'm a little surprised by all your upvotes for this comment. I spend at least as much -- and maybe more -- time with car mechanics, natural gas technicians, secretaries, administrators, managers, electricians, and so on as I do with "computer geeks". While I tend to find that people from most of those other sectors enjoy talking about a wide variety of subjects, "computer geeks" (those working in the field as technicians or programmers especially) are far more likely to conversationally hover around technical minutiae or other stereotypically geek interests, like sci-fi. Case in point: I recently attended a professionally-attired holiday dinner party with a corporate client, where most of the employees are scientists or engineers, and many of them are PhD'd in one subject or another. Conversation wandered from ice climbing to traveling to diesel engines to raising kids, and so on. Anything "tech" was strictly verboten. On the other hand, whenever I meet my geekier climbing buddies, it's usually only a matter of minutes before the conversation is about their latest gadget, toy, or other interesting thing in the field.