MediumThe Invisible Geek. Do you remember the last time you… | by Matt Schellhas | Jul, 2026 | MediumSitemapOpen in appSign up<br>Sign in

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The Invisible Geek

Matt Schellhas

6 min read·<br>1 hour ago

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Do you remember the last time you played catch with your dad?<br>My Field of Dreams moment came when I was 14 or 15. He would have been 42 or so. My high school baseball coach didn’t care for having a nerd on his team so I wasn’t getting much playing time. Still, I wanted to pitch, so asked my Dad if he’d catch me in the back yard. “Oh, not today. I am tired from work.” “My back is sore, maybe this weekend” and so on for two or three weeks.<br>Eventually he didn’t have any reason to deny a legitimate request and we went out to the back yard. He marched off sixty feet from a pile of dirt and we started in on it. A little warmup at first and then he got down into a catcher’s stance without any pads or a proper mitt and caught some JV pitching.<br>I didn’t throw particularly hard, but my pitches had a lot of movement. About a few dozen in, I threw a big looping curveball. The sort that starts at the batter’s head and dives into the strike zone. And he whiffed on it. Caught halfway between catching it forehand and catching it backhand, he did neither. The pitch missed his glove entirely and caught him square in the groin.<br>I went over to see how he was doing while doing my best not to laugh. He collected himself and the ball and we went inside with the wordless understanding that catch for the day was over.

Rumor has it that he had friends in college. Volleyball and other sports, pinochle and similar card games, tabletop wargames. I’d hear stories about how he’d keep them playing into the night until he won. They’d devour Star Trek and Tolkien and Asimov. He had changed majors to Computer Science from Landscape Architecture (the family business) after his freshman year. The man was a geek before the modern use of the term existed.<br>By the time I knew him, he was the epitome of the stoic geek. Quiet. Introverted. Unerringly rational. A touch cynical. In those forty years, I’m not sure if he had a single friend. He socialized (minimally) with the other parents at sports and band events, but they were more of associates. He bowled in leagues with Mom the whole time and played a little softball (that I barely remember), but the competition came first, not the people. He was occasionally bemused by the world around him, but mostly disappointed that people were quite so stupid. You could tell the difference because the corner of his lips would raise two millimeters under his moustache when amused by something.<br>Even after I learned that such behavior was not the norm for adult males in America, I couldn’t really blame him. He had lived a tough life. An only child to his own dour, stoic father — a remarried immigrant widower who lost his first wife to mental illness, and had fled Germany before World War Two. Dad had already lost a kidney (soccer injury) and an eye (glaucoma) by the time I could walk.<br>The lack of depth perception made his volunteer catching even more noble.

What does the life of a man with no friends look like? Extra-ordinary. Unbelievable to some of you. Idyllic to others.<br>He was the sort of person who did things well, or not at all. For Christmas 1986, Santa got The Bard’s Tale (for the kids). Dad was the geek who got out some graph paper to map the dungeons. Of course we had physical graph paper already in the house. Who doesn’t? When he spent hours crafting (award winning) model ships, he’d be the sort with an X-Acto knife slicing tiny strips of balsa wood into individual deck planks.<br>That carried over to his work as well. The man had one job for his entire working life. Not just the same job, but effectively the same role. For forty years (with two exceptions), he worked on the same codebase. Even as the department was bought and sold and bought again, he was there. Hell, it probably was on the same mainframe for all that time too. The only breaks were in 1999 to fix Y2K bugs in the dusty corners of a 200 year old company, and near the end of his career when the company had him teaching COBOL to Indians because it was more cost effective than modernizing the code.<br>I can’t remember a single day of overtime or a single weekend ever spent at the office. Home at 5 like clockwork. Never exhausted from the day. Ever dependable. Then it’d be off to soccer or baseball or band with the kids, or bowling for himself. Maybe just movies or a ballgame on television. The occasional errand. Minimal stress. Never drama.

When I was around 11, I told my Dad I didn’t want to go to Sunday School anymore. He said “okay” and that was that. My parents sent my brother and I there because it was something we should know about, even if they weren’t religious at all. (Or maybe they just wanted a morning of peace). What did he believe then? Doing the...