I have been called a "geek" by IT support people
It was intended in a more-or-less friendly way, at least I choose to interpret it as such.
I was a mere deployment tech (put PC on desk, turn on, copy user's data, remove old PC). But my boss tended to sneak me out to do the curlier support tasks as she had no faith in most of support to fix more than someone's word file. Most IT people today seem to treat a PC as a magical box. They have rote-learned some arcane gestures to manipulate the icons on the magic window to keep the godlet in the box mostly happy but have no real knowledge of how it really works.
I'm old-skool - I started with digital electronics after dropping out of a completely pointless senior high school experience back in the 80's. Ican (and have) build an 8- or 16-bit computer from chips up. Can pick up the basics of any language in a few days (interestingly it took exposure to Java back in the 90's to get my head around object-oriented before I could finally manage C++). A few years ago I spent a boring lunch break drawing a pure-logic router circuit on the whiteboard while doing a Networking course at trade college. It became very obvious why all the masks are inverted - significant saving in transistors, which back when these protocols were created was important.
Most of my knowledge is not formal and so not attached to a piece of paper, so finding a job I liked was a bit of a slog, but by starting at the entry level and showing what I had, I think I am finally there now - I now get to help Digital Media Creative Arts students make electronics/microcontroller-based art, amongst many other things - heaven.