At the Sermon on the Mount, so the Apostle Mark reported, Jesus said, “The meek shall inherit the earth.”

You’d have to say, in the two thousand years since, there has been scant evidence of this happening. Maybe there was an error in the translation.

The chroniclers of the New Testament were mystified by a word which seemed to mean ‘having no people skills and speaking in a staccato babble, unintelligible to others’. They struggled with the idea that people like this could inherit anything so they used ‘meek’ because it went well with the rest of the sermon.

But the state of the world today makes it pretty clear that what He meant to say was: “The geek shall inherit the earth”.

If your office network, payroll system, accounting program or just the home internet connection goes on the fritz, who do you defer to? That’s right, a ‘tech support’ geek.

Even those jokers on the boards of directors who get paid millions to oversee our corporate sector do not actually control how it all works. They too, follow the operating procedure written by the teams of geeks employed to keep the workflow online.

By contrast, remember in days gone by, how gaining wisdom and showing respect (at least in TV shows like ‘Kung Fu’) went like this:

Old Master Po, the Shaolin monk, is speaking to Kwai Chang Caine, his student.

Master Po: “Fear is the enemy, trust is the armour.”

Young Caine: “But not knowing what will happen, am I not wise to be afraid?”

Master Po: “He who conquers himself is the greatest warrior. Do what must be done with a docile heart.”

Young Caine: “Master. How can I know if this is possible for me?”

Master Po: “Listen for the colour of the sky. Look for the sound of the hummingbird’s wings. Search the air for the perfume of ice on a hot summer’s day. If you have found these things, you will know.”

Ah, the wisdom of age enlightening the inquisitiveness of youth. Compare that to how it works these days:

The mobile rings with a really-rockin’ ringtone and an old Frustrated Computer User speaks with Triistan who’s just left school and now works in tech support.

Old FCU: “The bloody computer’s clagged out again and I was wondering if you could tell me what’s up with it.”

Young Triistan: “Have you set up RemoteApp as administrator and configured the server to allow users to connect to just a single application using RDP/Terminal Services?”

Old FCU: “Pardon?”

Young Triistan: “Sounds like you’ll have to re-install Embolism 140/90.”

Old FCU: “What?”

Young Triistan: “Yeah, like I told you before, it integrates the high-speed intrusion prevention, content filtering, gateway-enforced anti-virus and does the ISP fail-over, the WAN redundancy and load balancing with inspection firewall and IPSec VPN.”

Old FCU: “Sorry?”

Young Triistan: “Look, just re-install, reboot, check the BIOS and call me back.”

[effects] Crash, bash, tinkle etc.

To quit this story, press Control, Alt, and Delete at the same time as you ponder what will happen when, like totally, the geek shall indeed inherit the earth.