I was surprised when my friend (who is also manager of my department) wanted to see “Attack of the Clones” on opening night last May. He can geek out on occasion, but he also has a wife and two children to offset those impulses. Still, he really wanted to do this, so we took off from work several hours early to wait in line at the Corona theater in San Francisco.

The scene was predictable. Everywhere you looked, people dressed in outlandish costumes brandished space-age weaponry. They waved yellow and blue lightsabers frantically, as if trying to land passenger planes. A group of laughing friends drank cans of a mystery substance from a gigantic R2-D2 ice cooler.

The guy in front of us, though, was of a completely different caliber. At first glance he was nothing unusual--he was in his thirties, dressed in a Ben Kenobi brown cloak, and holding a large, powerful-looking lightsaber. (If I owned a lightsaber, I would have brought it too. Because that’s what you do when in Rome--or among the Jedi, as the case may be.) But the guy started talking to his friend about his toy, and we learned that it was a hard-to-find item that cost him $200. But that’s not all: “I made several of my own modifications to strengthen the metal plating around the handle, and to improve the bulb intensity. Isn’t it bright?” He waved it around for effect. In fact, I noticed that he always stood in a kind of half-crouching attack pose, as if fearful of being jumped by stormtroopers at any given moment.

My friend seemed to take inspiration from the rampant geekiness around him, and started talking about another friend’s stereo system. A high-end system costing thousands of dollars, it had rear speakers. And subwoofers for those speakers. And equalizers for those subwoofers. And hardware upon hardware designed to make every drop of sound as crystal-clear as possible.

As my friend talked, the guy in front of us started listening. He even arched his neck so he can hear. And, in the middle of my friend’s sentence, the guy suddenly turned around--still holding his prized lightsaber in front of him, still half-crouched in order to defend the universe--and looked my friend in the eye, and said, with an earnest voice that had never known a single shade of irony:

“Isn’t that just a little bit obssessive?”