Might be time for an upgrade

There’s a Friends episode where Phoebe goes to answer her phone and pulls a huge brick phone from her purse while her friends watch in amazement. I bring  up this example because something similar happened today while at work.

My carpool partner is one of the biggest geeks I know. He’s an SDET at Microsoft who has six computers at home and is nerd enough to have written his own blogging software. He’s always hacking this or that and puts me to shame when it comes to technical matters. I mean, this is the type of guy that writes about “rendering controls” on his blog.

But today he messaged me in the afternoon asking if maybe we could leave work a little early. I said that’s cool and then he dropped the bomb:

My wife wants to go shopping before Prison Break starts since we don’t have a DVR

So much for his tech cred. It was gone in an instant. No DVR? You can always tell when someone is DVR-less when they know the day, time and channel of their favorite shows. He even has DirecTV installed. I told him to call DirecTV and tell them to send out a guy with a DVR…IMMEDIATELY.

I don’t know what to think. I wonder if Microsoft would have hired him if this would have come out during the interview loop. At this point I wouldn’t be surprised to see him bring along an original Walkman on our commute into work tomorrow.