New guy in town part 2

(If you haven't already, go read the previous post.) Being the new guy in town has brought several new experiences into my life:

• I now patronize four new coffee shops. Five if you count the one in Borders.
• I'm learning new geography (more on that in a future post).
• I get lost a lot, as in an extra 15 minutes roaming around in the rain on the motorcycle this evening trying to figure out where I am. With my rain gear in the side carrier.
• I get to say "I've never been here before in my life," a lot. This creates one of two reactions in the clerk on the other side of the counter. Either increased politeness and cheerful hospitality, or thoughts along the line of  "Hey, a new sucker!" The former raise their eyebrows, the latter lower them. 

I also make new friends, and that is what this post is about.

My new job is in a smallish office building, about the size of a standalone doctor's office. We occupy the first floor, and the dozen or so folks here are mostly youngish (compared to me), extremely competent geeks. For example, they get math jokes. (Picture the letter pi telling the square root of minus 1 to "get real." That's pretty funny.)  I just finished a glossary of their technical terms. It's 11 pages long. They speak in abstruse languages like Ruby, Scrum, OOP, Jira, and yaml.To their credit, they seem impressed with my German, Greek, and Hebrew.

My colleagues are mostly guys, though one is a slender blonde who wears her hair in glorious, curly disarray. She has a knack for pointed (read piercing) wit; she's better at it than the guys, and they hold her in respect—or fear. One fellow, who prefers a diminutive name, could fit the nickname "Goldilocks" except his hair is black. Another happens to be from the neck of the woods where I came from, and he's actually normal. My wife snickers whenever she hears that someone is from Elkton, the town just over the border in Maryland. Another of these colleagues has a beard long enough that he could fit right in with the Amish. Another, whose name ends with a q, taught me to say "how are you" in Bengali. Every one of them has something really interesting in their background.

Bucky Balls

They all play with little rare-earth magnetic spheres called bucky balls. You should see the shapes they make. I saw a stellated icosahedron (look it up) and a TIE fighter. They won't make into a nice moebius strip, though.
I feel honored to be invited when they go out for lunch, which is often at Annapolis' big mall, just across the street. The street happens to be the town's main drag, and it has no provision for pedestrians. They call crossing the street "playing Frogger."

Usually the food court is busier than this

We go to the food court, every man for himself, then find a table, and eat. Conversation is lively and they don't talk about work. They even listen when I contribute.  They're not too good at one kind of math—they guessed my age at somewhere between 58 and 72.