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Girl Genius. Source: Wired, 5 Tips for Rais­ing Your Girl Geek, 06/08/09 (Online)

I have often won­dered why I seem to be so alone in the world as a girl geek.

No mat­ter how hard I try, I never seem to meet other equally geeky girls. For exam­ple, if I try and engage my girl-friends, in a con­ver­sa­tion about hand­bags or shoes, fine; but if I bring up the ben­e­fits of hav­ing an Android smart­phone ver­sus an iPhone, they look at me like I am from Mars.

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A num­ber of years ago, we had a com­pany off-site fea­tur­ing a trea­sure hunt as the pri­mary chal­lenge for the day. This involved teams of Ban­ner­ites zoom­ing around Lon­don in black cabs look­ing for the answers to a series of cryp­tic clues.

Whilst it was com­pet­i­tive and fun, that approach seems anti­quated by today’s stan­dards. For an agency whose rai­son d’être is to under­stand and use tech­nol­ogy bet­ter than any other agency, scrib­bling the answers onto bits of paper wasn’t really a good way of track­ing progress or edu­cat­ing our team on new tech­nolo­gies.

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I can’t remem­ber a worse year than 2009. Every news­mon­ger has told me how bad it will be before it even started. The world econ­omy has expired like an untied fes­tive bal­loon. Envi­ron­men­tal issues are threat­en­ing civ­i­liza­tion. What can improve the sta­tus quo?

I spend most of my time in Lon­don, which is an infer­nally dif­fi­cult city to sur­vive in. Travel dif­fi­cul­ties, hous­ing costs, and pop­u­la­tion den­sity are a few of the chal­lenges that Lon­don­ers endure every day. But the pain is off­set by the cul­tural and eth­nic diver­sity, which makes this heav­ing metrop­o­lis one of the most fas­ci­nat­ing cities on the planet.

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OK, so I’m prob­a­bly one of the few peo­ple in the world not to see the whole she­bang live but read­ing the tran­script in the paper today I was awestruck by the writ­ing. It man­aged to be grand with­out being too grandiose. It felt fresh but still hit the right tone for a world-stage occasion.

There were some beau­ti­ful phrases:

To those who cling to power through cor­rup­tion and deceit and the silenc­ing of dis­sent, know that you are on the wrong side of his­tory; but that we will extend a hand if you are will­ing to unclench your fist.

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Prior to my first Japan­ese trip, a col­league gave me this sage advice, “In Tokyo, things are what they are…unless they are not” Hav­ing been to the Far East before, the dichotomy of his coun­sel didn’t sur­prise me – after all, if Asia epit­o­mizes dichotomies and Tokyo must be the poster child.

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I have to admit it, I get fan­tas­ti­cally excited by Web 2.0. As much as I love many of the com­pa­nies that have appeared on the back of the tech­nol­ogy, I love it for more nos­tal­gic rea­sons too.

I got into this busi­ness back in the day when the web was just com­ing on-stream, got my first inter­net account with Com­puserve, read my first issues of Wired and Mondo 2000, and believed this stuff was going to change the world.

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After all the run up, the end­less prepa­ra­tions, the extra pairs of socks, our Byte Night team came out the other side unscathed and raised over £5,500 in the process.

All eyes were on the weather on Fri­day as it looked like they might be bet­ter off build­ing an ark than zip­ping up a sleep­ing bag. In the end it stayed dry and our team of Rod, Belinda, Nikki and Katie got a lux­u­ri­ous 4 hours sleep before being woken by the chimes of Big Ben and the joy of dew-sodden clothes.

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Ah the 80s. When men were men. When women were men. And when most chil­dren were men too. When the hair was a big as the expense accounts. And when adver­tis­ing ruled.

Fri­day saw Ban­ner turn back the clock to the 80s with Power Dress­ing Fri­day. Ban­ner­ites from across the com­pany dusted off their braces, put on their whitest white socks and their best Face-magazine pouts.

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