IT Girl – Fashion, fitness and fixing things

headscarves, the whole lot. However, as a lowly IT girl, the only resemblance I have to my heroines of the silent movies is a (slightly lopsided) bob and a penchant for gin cocktails.

You see fashion, in the world of the IT girl, is rather less fun. There are no cigarette holders or strings of pearls and certainly no stockings rolled down to the knee. Clothing must be “practical” (shudder) in case desks need to be clambered over to access misbehaving printers and the like. My shoes must be comfortable and my makeup must not startle the engineers. Oh, and I am not allowed to wear my dungarees – not even my smart pair.

This has limited my wardrobe somewhat. My current working day ensembles tend to resemble pajamas (leggings, vests, baggy jumpers) which does little to improve my post-lunch napping tendencies. As for comfortable shoes, if I could get any closer to actually wearing slippers I would.

I am loath to admit it, but the comfortable shoe plays a vital, if unattractive, role in my day. My job involves rather a lot of walking about, the site is large and things must be carried from one end of it to the next. Quite often this necessitates the use of the IT girls’ natural enemy: The Yellow Trolley.

The Yellow Trolley, unloaded, appears to weigh almost as much as me, it has runners that stick out right at ankle height and four wheels, each of different sizes and each with a sense of free will rare to an inanimate object. Adventures with TYT often result in bruising and swearing and multiple sudden encounters with door-frames.

TYT and I travel around 5km a day around the site, with me doing at least another three without the sadistic thing. This is a horrific amount of exercise, but thankfully it is well balanced out by the unremitting supply of free food. Not only do I get jam doughnuts and chocolate biscuits on tap in the office, but I am frequently offered sweets, fruit and snacks on my travels to repair hardware. Unfortunately the continuous stream of junk food, combined with long distance marches in the hot sun and ridiculous levels of air con really do play havoc on an IT girl’s complexion.

Blending in with the IT crowd is turning out not to be so hard really, despite my lack of interest in Wimbledon limiting the conversation somewhat. People in the department are friendly, helpful and surprisingly forgiving of my general ineptitude. They are also very interested in what they do and incredibly keen on explaining it to me. So far I have found out what the Vulcan Laser does and have been promised a tour of the Diamond synchrotron - this is all very exciting to my little nerdy heart.

Now I have been an IT girl for a whole seven hardworking days and actually do appear to be capable of fixing things. This is quite reassuring to my line manager, who I feel was rather worried upon my arrival when I couldn't get my desktop PC to turn on. Things that I have been able to repair in one way or another include a CD drive that could no longer write CDs (I didn’t realise people still did that either) and a printer that had an annoying squeak to it (the squeaking ceased once I jammed a lolly stick between the two offending pieces of plastic).

My repair approach may be a little ad hoc, but it is effective. The greatest fix that I have managed though, is securing five days paid leave over the summer, along with a four day bank holiday weekend. This mean that they will pay me to go to my graduation. Really, being an IT girl could be much, much worse.

Published on The Yorker