"The guys I work with everyday, ‘The boys’ as I call them, are up to all sorts of shenanigans all day."
If the title of my piece is making your thoughts stray in all different directions, let me put your mind to rest. Yes, we writers sometimes use such underhanded methods to grab your attention. If you are reading this, you’re most likely a man, or at least on your way to becoming one.
You may be wondering who these 15 men are, and what is the deal with this 1 woman I’m talking about. To quench your curiosity, let me first introduce you to myself and my life.
Have you ever met a girl who can sit through multiple hours of gameplay just watching the screen with wonder and even occasionally picking up that controller to play? Do you know women who wake up in the morning to the sound of Tech YouTube videos playing discreetly in the adjacent room? Ever had a long conversation with a woman about the difference between active and passive 3D, or about the company making the next iPhone’s processor? Well, that’s me. And, that is probably the reason why I found myself, the only girl, working in a tech publication with a team of 15 extremely geeky guys.
“Will you be intimidated by so many guys in the team?”
“Will you be intimidated by so many guys in the team?” A question that was asked when I first dared to interview with Digit, left me struggling to answer for a split second. My mind said “YES!” But, that little voice inside suddenly found its strength and answered, “No, in fact I’m afraid it could go the other way around.” Truth be told, I was petrified! Although I did know my sh*t, so to speak, I was overawed by those whose words I read even as a child.
Nevertheless, what has followed since then is an experience few of my kind would have had. If you saw us, in our zone, the cozy space we share with posters from our gaming mag SKOAR! scattered across the walls, it would be very easy to point the odd one out (female and maybe the one with the cleanest desk).
"The guys I work with everyday, ‘The boys’ as I call them, are up to all sorts of shenanigans all day."
The guys I work with everyday, ‘The boys’ as I call them, are up to all sorts of shenanigans all day. There’s Shrey who is always eagerly scouring for news every morning, after taking an unimaginably long metro ride, full of relentless commuters and interesting smells. He always has stories to tell. Then there’s Hardik, the official jester of the office, who has an inter-office Slack group named after him. We call it ‘Sh*t Hardik says’. Prasid is hard to miss with a mountain of smartphones and empty boxes surrounding what he likes to call ‘his corner’ – the one he called dibs on. If you see a small head with giant headphones on it, that would be Souvik. He’s usually occupied wrapping his brains around our stories as he edits with electronica blasting in his ears. Sameer is the king of the ‘that’s what she said’ jokes, and you might have spotted him way too many times on our YouTube channel (or making people jump up in their seats with his incessant antics). Bossman Soham is working the clock all day, while he stays tuned to the buzzing conversation in the room and occasionally breaks out that brilliant one-liner, which leaves us all in splits. And then…there’s me.
My long-distance colleagues, the lords of the Digit Magazine and the guys publishing this column right here, work out of maximum city. If you think Bombay (what veterans call it) and Delhi are two cities always competing with each other, you are right. But in our case, the arguments that usually ensue revolve around disagreements on the best smartphone of the year, or who gets to review a game or how it’s so unfair that some of us have mind blowing gaming rigs at work (That’s the ‘Bombay boys’) while other make do with standard issue PCs, laptops and tablets (That’s us).
Sound like a handful. Don’t they? Be that as it may, I think I’m finally where I wanted to be. A place where I am constantly challenged yet, when I need to, I can throw some punches around (literally). The geeks that surround me daily remind me of why I love my profession in the first place. Because, there’s no better job than that where barriers of gender are broken, where men and women can together wonder like children at the marvels of modern innovation, where everything is always a possibility, you just need to find the right app to do it. A place governed solely by tech. A place like no other. A place called Digit.
This article was first published in the June 2016 issue of Digit magazine. To read Digit's articles first, subscribe here or download the Digit e-magazine app.
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Adamya Sharma
Managing editor, Digit.in - News Junkie, Movie Buff, Tech Whizz! View Full Profile
