Chris and I are taking the Red Hat Linux Certification Fast Track course this week. We decided to do it to as resume fodder and, as a side benefit, to beef up our company’s credit when it comes to designing Linux solutions for our client: something they wouldn’t have even considered just one year ago.

Red Hat has a few different certifications, and the one we are taking is, I think, the second-highest or highest-level one they offer. It’s a full-day examination on Friday, with labs and the like, so I was bracing for our classmates to be ultra-geeks. You know the types: Linux on their laptops, working for two days straight to get their sound working on their desktop so they can brag about it, lots of “humorous” references to problems in their environment with configuring Linux and the like, plenty of blustery, geek ego on display.

Well, being that this class is supposed to prepare the attendee for a difficult exam, each participant was rather meek the first day or so. But the course material has been very, very basic: like basic UNIX type stuff. We spent a long time “learning” about sticky bits and how to use 4-digit chmod and the like, which is stuff anybody trying to obtain the second-highest or highest Linux certification should already know. I think the problem is that some of these people aren’t taking the test at the end, so they’re just trying to learn whatever they can. But the REAL problem is that the ease of the material thus far has empowered the ultra-nerds with a Big Gulp-sized injection of Geek Ego. It has destroyed my and Chris’s ability to enjoy the class.

Now, instead of studying and working dilligently, we get outbursts in the middle of class about how funny it was when this one particular asshole, and his boss, who is also in the class, and his compatriot, who is also sitting beside him, had to change the configuration of twenty firewalls on the same day because of an exploit and gee! how funny was that? Or we get to hear about everyone’s home network and how complicated or complex it is—something I’ve done on MY site, indiciating that I am, indeed, a geek, but at least you have to actually take the effort to read it and I don’t blurt it out in class and force the information down your throat.

This actually happened. A geek was getting so fired up about his non-funny joke thay he chortled into the buffet lunch, coating one of the courses in his nerd spittle. I was denied my veggies because this guy thought it was hysterical that he said “sendmdail is an arch-enemy of mine.”

So now I cringe and IM with Chris during class while this Quentin Tarantino-looking motherfucker in size 40 501s goes on and on about how he’s “discovered” all sorts of quirks in this or that, which have nothing to do with the material at hand.