I got my business cards for my new job the other day and have been handing them out to friends and family. When you're in my type of position, you generally don't go through a lot of them. I suppose now that I'm consulting, I'll have more of an opportunity to pass them around. Anyway, I was taking a look at my card when I saw my email address there. Suddenly it hit me. How many email addresses do I have? After thinking about it for a little while, I came to the realization that email address for geeks are like shoes are for women. We have more than we need, and we have to rationalize the ones we have to people who don't understand why we need so many.

Let me go through them for you:

1. I have my work email at the consulting company I work for. That's so they can send me email, and confidential stuff that I can check through their webmail system.
   
2. I have an email address at the client company I'm working at. That is so they can send me stuff through their corporate email, and I can get meeting requests and stuff.
   
3. I have a home email address through my ISP.
   
4. I have an @name address that I want to start using as my general purpose email address, but haven't started using yet.
   
5. I have an @gmail.com address where all my blog stuff goes to.
   
6. I have an @yahoo.com address that I automatically got when I started using Yahoo Instant Messenger.
   
7. I have an @hotmail.com address that I never check. That address is for stuff that requires a valid email address, but I know will result in spam.
   
8. I still occasionally check my alumni email address for the college I went to.

The scary thing is that those are the ones that I can think of just off the top of my head. If I were really to think about it hard, I could probably come up with at least one or two more. So from this little revelation about myself, I have come up with the following "You Know You're a Geek When":

You know you're a geek when you have more email addresses than shoes.

Of course nothing is as ever as simple as it seems at first blush. There are a couple of implications to this statement. First of all, it's harder for women to be true geeks. Why? Obviously it's because they have more shoes. Second, if your jock index is high enough, that can offset the geek factor. I say that because as I count in my head, I think I have at least 8 pairs of shoes myself. When you start adding up the running shoes, specialty biking shoes, cross trainers, climbing shoes, hiking boots, work shoes, Tiva's, the number gets up there pretty damn quick.