“This is line for Oracle,” the gentleman asserted, his thick Taiwanese excising the articles from his declaration. The man stood a full foot shorter than me, his young son burying his face in a knee, cowed by the kind of freaky haired dork appearance that he was likely going to have to wait until junior high to see again.

“I’m pretty sure this is the line for TechCrunch,” I replied matter-of-factly. “There aren’t going to be any geeks in the Oracle line.” This earned a few chuckles and murmurs as the line of dorks around us took a quick look up from behind their DSes. A few moments later, a member of the Metreon staff came by and, seeing the Oracle employee was clearly out of place, gave him the heads up that the line for the Iron Man sneak preview for Oracle was on the other side of the vinyl retact-o-barrier. He lifted the cattle chute man for people and shuffled his son through. Pressing out the wrinkles of his Armani Exchange polo as he stood back up, he looked at me and huffed, “We have geeks at Oracle too.”

“Right pal. That’s why only a dozen people from your outfit showed up for a comic book movie.”

My boy Nate swooped tickets the evening before for the opening shot of the summer big-budget blockbuster season, netting through the blogosphere seats to catch the first good Marvel movie in a long damn while two days before the plebian public would be allowed to see it. Iron Man tickets two days before it hit theaters; it may not be ingenious event planning, but holy-sweet-Mary-of-the-spinning-gerbil was it effective. The event got snatched up swiftly by Bay Area blogites, drawing the ire of Oracle who planned a similar event for their crew that day and a swift cease and desist from Marvel’s general counsel. The forces of good (read: free market commerce) ultimately prevailed, allowing me a comfortable spot at the front of the line for the one big studio movie I was stoked about this year.

The perseverance of TechCrunch’s quick acting and evidently fearless lawyer was well rewarded in terms of attendance as nearly 500 people were already in line some ten minutes after the line formation was officially sanctioned to begin. The buzz in the line was about Jon Favreau capturing the smart, indie spirit of Swingers in an easily formulaic medium and the triumphant return of the immensely talented Robert Downey, Jr. As in most things, the dorks had the cynicism carefully cultivated in the year and a half of the film’s development completely shorn by fan boy glee with the trailers released in the past two weeks. Once witnessing in all its CG splendor of Tony Stark’s mechanical suit, the skeptical distaste for Marvel film production was reversed. That is to say it did not merely disappear, it changed temporal state such as to suggest it never occurred.

Possessing an enviable position in the line, I was easily in the first hundred to get into the movie theatre, though even by the patience of AMC’s security was thin as a freshly laid crepe. “Laptops are not allowed in here,” the woman said in recently rehearsed monotone.

“Well then, I guess I can’t see this movie,” I retorted, zipping up my bag.

“You can go in, but you can’t take it out at all, understand,” she repeated for the thirtieth time in the last five minutes, her inflection dropping from imperative feigning interrogative to hopelessness acting like authority. Such was her toil and likely the reason this crowd took so unusually long to seat -- were they to follow their own policy, I’m not sure anyone would have been allowed in.

The nerdly audience clearly had the theater people on edge. We weren’t merely geeks to them. We were geeks from the Internet, that place where movies end up as soon as they are shown on any screen anywhere. I’m certain the Oracle group didn’t have the platoon of security staff gruffly marching through their ranks while the movie trivia played, tersely telling people “for the last time before I kick you outta here” to turn off any electronic devices. It was the kind of fear of technology I usually only see when I visit family in Kansas. This theater had an auditorium full of dorks which, in MPAA lingo, equated to installing a barcolonger and beer fridge in the henhouse just in case the foxes were tired or thirsty after eating every last fucking chicken they had.

The entire film we were monitored by at least two people with nightvision scopes at any given time and for the first full half hour by four or five. I would laugh and point when their stern, watchful eye made it my way. The red light would drop and, though the theater was dark, I’m could feel their pissed off stares. I’m not sure what they expected to see after they sent out the security manager to address us before the movie, but if they didn’t want to have a load of nerds shooting them dirty looks the entire night, they probably should have picked a speaker with better handle on the English language, let alone technology.

She squeaked out, starting to buckle under our incredulous and disapproving looks, “I know ya’ll are tech gurus or somethin’. But I don’t wanna see no cell phones or cameras out durin’ the movie or ya’ll be asked to leave.”

I am sure that shit didn’t happen at Oracle’s screening.

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