Hercules had twelve labors to accomplish on his path to heroism. How many tasks lie before the Nerd? Must he rescue a fried Amiga from near-demise? Rewire the demo models at Radio Shack? Email Bill Gates a million-character manifesto entitled "Greed is Good"? If Nerdliness is defined by small acts of dubious heroism, then our new Nerd of the Week, Brian C. fulfills this ideal. Although to most he appears as a Data Fabrication Specialist for Lexis-Nexis, he is a secret Nerdcules, waiting to tackle the next impossible task.

NW: When did you realize you were a member of the secret brotherhood of Nerds?
BC: My father, who worked for the military, took me into work one evening and allowed me to program a mainframe. At that time, it was just a matter of feeding cards into a slot, in the right sequence. It was from that point that I became intrigued by computers and just had to have one.

NW: What was your most daring software rescue?
BC: I was being placed into a database management position for a company - no prior database experience, mind you. I was told that I had to fix a database problem. With no prior database programming experience, I fixed the problem. One thousand cycles later (3 a.m.) the system went into a loop. Worse still the database, which was massive, started appending information from the beginning of the file, overwriting previous entries. To resolve the problem, I had to bring the system down, remove the loop in the program instructions, copy the database to another system for editing, replace with a backup - first getting all the DB stats, bring the system down for the match/merge and append, got the current DB entry number, ran a quick comparison on "new data" DB and backup database for duplicates, renumbered and merged "new data" with backup database and brought the system back online.

NW: What's the moral of that fable?
BC: A company should not be overzealous by thinking it can save money and expect a 0% flaw ratio by throwing someone inexperienced in for $45,000 to replace a guy who, at $60,000 knew what he was doing.

NW: With which demigods would you entangle your fate?
BC: If I had my pick, I'd either meet Bill Gates in person or the CEO of Novell, Dr. Eric Schmidt. He has three bonus points in my book because he was involved in the roll-out of Java, he worked for Xerox - my father did as well, and he worked for Bell Labs - where I want to hold a position.

NW: Other than your hubris and Nerdly feats of excellence, what other factors contribute to your heroism?
BC: Well, I have just about every award that Radio Shack has to offer for management, besides awards for being there for years and years.

NW: How has Nerdworld aided and abetted your Nerdliness?
BC: I read the bios (editor's note: a Nerd may not be truly Nerdculean unless he/she reads, re-reads, bookmarks and emails Nerd of the Week features to fellow Nerds).