You know you've been hacking too long when...
The set-up line
for a genre of one-liners told by hackers about themselves. These
include the following:
- not only do you check your email more often than your paper
mail, but you remember your network address faster than your
postal one.
- your SO kisses you on the neck and the first thing you
think is "Uh, oh, priority interrupt."
- you go to balance your checkbook and discover that you're
doing it in octal.
- your computers have a higher street value than your car.
- in your universe, `round numbers' are powers of 2, not 10.
- more than once, you have woken up recalling a dream in
some programming language.
- you realize you have never seen half of your best friends.
[An early version of this entry said "All but one of these
have been reliably reported as hacker traits (some of them quite
often). Even hackers may have trouble spotting the ringer." The
ringer was balancing one's checkbook in octal, which I made up out
of whole cloth. Although more respondents picked that one
out as fiction than any of the others, I also received multiple
independent reports of its actually happening, most famously
to Grace Hopper while she was working with BINAC in 1949. ---
ESR]
