Two nerds crossing

I had a guy pull up next to me at a redlight tonight. (He was the passenger; his girlfriend was drvining). "HEY! Your license plate?"

I smile. "Yeah, it's for Vash the Stampede." (Sometimes other nerds ask me that; they think their nerdiness is so rare that they figure VASH TS must stand for something else.

"That's AWESOME!" (They get the green arrow, and start to pull away.) "You are the DUDE!"

As I watched them make their turn, I thought to myself "You are the 'dude'?" Never, in my entire life, as anyone told me I was 'the dude.' Now, let me give you a little nerd background, for those not in the know. Nerds are excited to meet each other. Not that we're all looking for other nerdy friends to be buddies with or anything like that. But I think years of being made to feel abnormal and outcast manifest themselves with an initial excitement. I know nothing about this guy; for all I know, we could hate each other outside of the fact that we're both nerds. Maybe he's racist, or a homophobe, or a psychotic religious freak, or all three! I don't know. But for that brief instant of paths crossing, two nerds get excited at encountering someone else like themselves. We're reassured that we're not alone in the world.

This guy, however, was sooooo excited, that he couldn't even think straight. He couldn't even form a sensible sentence; I can guarantee you that he didn't really mean to say "You're the DUDE!" He had to have been driving away thinking "the dude?"

But my story doesn't end there. No, I encountered him in the supermarket not five minutes later (I was checking out his girlfriend, thought she looked kinda nerdy, then looked to see what kind of guy she was with and it was him.) "It's you! You're the dude! I'm sorry, I have to shake your hand." I'm not making this up. I don't think I could make this up. Teletubbies in the trash? Yeah, that's all me. But this guy was besides himself that there was another nerd so monstrous in proportion that he had something of a nerdy basis officially registered with the government. I shook his hand, and we talked briefly about other nerd things (I hadn't heard of the series "X," but I'd recently seen FFVII Advent Children and we agreed that it was awesome.) And that was it. Just a brief, passing encounter, that probably left both of us in a better mood than when we'd met. Oh, yeah, and he let me french his girlfriend too. ... Okay, not really. Maybe if I'd've had on a red trench coat...