I’ve been employed in the tech industry for the better part of the last three decades, so you might imagine that I work with a whole lotta nerds – and, to be fair, I do.

Some of them are kind of on the diet nerd end of the scale, the sorts of folks who fly their nerd flag with their Wal-Mart Captain America T-Shirt, but there are definitely a few alpha nerds around here, and a couple of them know me well enough to know that my boring office drone act is 100% tatamae and 0% honne.  I swear, when I decide to finally call it quits with my current employer, I am going to deck my cube out in ponies and maids and watch heads explode.  This will presumably be followed by my boss bringing a box over for me.

Anyway, so I was browsing Lifehacker and in a state of temporary toy lust for this thing, just because the notion of a tube amplifier is so delightfully geeky, and I showed it to one of these alphas, whose dismissive response was a half-sneered “It won’t make your Girls’ Generation sound any better.”

I think I rather managed to shock him when I showed him what I actually had on my phone.

At any rate, he wandered off muttering something about it being impossible to troll me.  I think that’s one in the W column for me.

(And, no, I didn’t wind up buying a new desktop amplifier.)