How to… be a gadget guru

1. Research. You spend sleepless nights on intense online research. You visit every techie site; you memorise every spec of the gadget down to the last byte or circuit or megapixel. You spend every weekend glued to your computer screen obsessing over which version of the gadget you need (putting up colour-coded charts mapping out the pros and cons of each is optional). For a true-blue gadget geek, this is possibly the most important step of the process; even more than the actual acquisition.

2. Acquisition. This one is obvious, of course. There is no question of not buying it. Whether you have to repeatedly outbid a fellow bloodshot-eyed geek for it on eBay or you have to have it shipped at five times the cost of the gadget itself from some obscure corner of Japan or Germany; whether you need to pitch a tent outside the store overnight to be The First to own one or you have to trawl the grey market to get hold of it from a one-eyed Burmese pirate. The bottom line is, you must own the gadget.

3. Give gyan. Once you own it, the job of the gadget guru is spread the word. Constantly. Loudly. And in exhaustive detail. Whether people around you want to hear it or not. All those weeks of research have made you a walking, talking fount of wisdom on the subject and you can’t contain yourself. Whether you’re at a la-di-da cocktail party or at a stodgy office meeting, your mission is clear — inform the poor, technologically Stone Age masses around you just what they’re missing out on.

4. Online gyan. Let’s face it. Sometimes there just aren’t enough ‘real people’ around to enlighten. And for some strange reason, they don’t seem to appreciate being lectured to by you. So, once again, you take recourse to the Internet, that haven for geeks of all sorts. Now that you know it all and own it all, you get to be the one writing those long, supercilious reviews on techie websites. You get to put newbies and trolls alike in their place, and smack down pretenders to guru-dom online. Ah yes, being a gadget guru was never so sweet.

5. Rinse and repeat. Unfortunately, the cruel truth is that there is no rest for the gadget geek. Because that next and improved gadget is always just around the corner, and if you stand around gloating for too long, the snotty-nosed kid down the street will end up owning it before you do. And there’s nothing sadder than a gadget guru with (gasp) an outdated toy. So it must begin again — research, acquisition, gyan… and you wouldn’t want it any other way.