Sometimes geekish skills can help with non-geekish things.
Once upon a time there was a professional meta-geek I’ll call Jon. He was a professional because he got paid to do geekish things, and a meta-geek because he advised other people how to do geekish things. One day a small impoverished group — a charity if I recall correctly — asked him the best way to sort a million records. This was back when sorting a million of anything was a big deal; we were running units of 80+ people on computers less powerful than my cellphone (which is likely less powerful than your cellphone). In the course of asking about what they were up to, it dawned on Jon that “sorting a million records” wasn’t the real problem; it was an overly-specific partial answer to something a heck of a lot simpler. Jon was doing what system design geeks call ” requirements elicitation ” — talking to clients to figure out what they really need.
Well, we’re in the midst of a federal election here in Canada, and one thing is certain: somebody’s going to say “the result was unfair, because we don’t have proportional representation” — a system so obviously superior to ” first past the post ” that when given the choice recently, the people of British Columbia and Ontario rejected it outright.