You resent having to give out your Social Security number to any person or company, especially because you have never given it when dealing with the Social Security administration.

You already own or covet one of those special screen covers that prevent people on either side of you of from reading your screen.

You can't prevent yourself from laughing out loud when someone announces they think that computer viruses, buffer overflows, or whatever will be solved in five years.

You hate upgrading your computer because it means spending days trying to copy and convert all your cool hacker and anti-hacker tools to the new system.

You have solid friends on computer security discussion lists, whom you know would be there for you in a life-crisis pinch but that you've never met in person or talked to on the phone.

Although you never try to shoulder surf other people's passwords, you can always tell by sound alone when they haven't typed one that is eight characters or more, and you chuckle inside.

When someone hands you their USB key to copy something, you always decline, and instead offer your known, clean USB key. You would also prefer one-time, disposable, Tupperware-like memory drives if they existed.

You always slow down when reading security guidance looking for the words "should," "must," "never," and "always" -- and you understand their importance.

By the time you read a CERT security bulletin, you've known about the issue for several days.

You always investigate SSL certificate errors when they come up in your browser.

Finally, you know you're a computer security person when you have so frequently spoken passionately to complete strangers about computer security and the frustration it entails that you know what it's like to be covered in sweat -- and the listening party to have a look on their face that says they didn't know what they were in for.