Hello, and welcome to my first Kudos and Calamities. I’m taking over for Force Flow as the co-writer (with Tyler Thompson) of the column. If you’re a regular at PCMech Forums — and probably even if you’re only an occasional visitor — you’ve doubtless seen one of my many posts, usually about some laptop or another. This first K&C column is not about laptops (I’m leaving that for later ones), but rather about posers, people who pretend to be a particular kind of person, but really aren’t. You probably know someone like this; they buy expensive stuff because of this pretension, but then never take advantage of it.
The first type of person I’d like to cover is the “Gamer.” I should know about this type, because I thought of myself as a “gamer” in the past. I used the fact that I was a “gamer” to justify the purchase of an expensive video card, an expensive CPU and RAM, an expensive LCD, and later an even more expensive gaming laptop. However, I have come to realize — sort of a dimwitted epiphany — that although I might game once in a while, I don’t do so nearly enough to justify this type of thing. 90% of the time I’m using my computer for internet and email, and the other 10% is taken up half by actual productive stuff, and half by listening to music. For that reason, I’m thinking of selling my blinged-out Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 and getting a nice, conservative-looking, sensible IBM ThinkPad.
Some “gamers,” on the other hand, never come to the realization that they don’t actually game that often. They buy $1000 SLI video card setups and super-sensitive gaming mice, and man, those GeForce 7800GTXes display Firefox with amazing clarity. In the end, though, these people are not going to be gaming all that much. They’re really only buying these expensive computer components for bragging rights, and using their “gaming” as a front so people won’t say, “You’re just spending five grand on a computer for the bragging rights.” The “gamer” can then say, “No, I need this stuff to play Battlefield 2 at max resolution!”
There are other types of people who do this kind of thing too. There are the “audiophiles,” who buy $300 soundcards and even more expensive speakers but don’t use most of the functions and probably couldn’t tell the difference from onboard sound and $100 speakers anyway. That’s all they really need to listen to their 128 kbps MP3s, frankly. It’s the same thing with them, though, although to a lesser extent; they dropped big bucks on their setup so they could have the bragging rights. Then there’s the “video editor,” who gets a DVD burner (although that’s not such a big expense nowadays, but it used to be) and a copy of Adobe Premiere that he plays with once and forgets about.
Of course, this type of personality is not unique to the technology world. There’s also the “drag racer” who never goes to the track, the “golfer” who gets expensive clubs but barely ever uses them, the “musician” with the expensive guitar that he never plays… The list goes on.
I’m sure you personally know at least one person who fits this profile. And the next time he goes out and buys another graphics card or speaker set or cold air intake or guitar pick, you’ll probably do what you always do — shake your head slowly and wonder when he’ll get something worthwhile to spend his money on. Someday he may realize his folly, or he may just figure out something else that’s more important — his girlfriend, his mortgage, whatever. Or he may just tell himself, “Okay, I’m doing this for the bragging rights. What’s wrong with that? It’s a free country.” And that it is.
