Not Every Tech Site for Women Has to Have an Ultrasound on It.

“Oh, you hate your job? Why didn’t you say so? There’s a support group for that. It’s called everybody, and they meet at the bar.” — Drew Carey

Hate is a really strong word for the job I was in not even one week ago today. My relationship with my previous career path was parallel to the feeling when you’re in a relationship with someone that’s so sweet/makes you breakfast in bed/rescues baby animals from burning structures/lets you play WoW for 12 hours straight but something’s oh, how do you explain it? Well, off. You’re not clicking in that “this is the one OMG PONIES!!1!” way and if they would just OH PLEASE TINY BABY JESUS cheat on you or slash your tires or slap your mom to give you an excuse to dump them, things would be so much easier! They’re so great, buuuuuut…

That’s how I was feeling in advertising sales.

I started out early with my geekiness. One could argue you’re just born that way, and a recent look at my Langley Middle School yearbooks I can’t help but agree. I remember doing cut and paste layout for my dad’s offset printing shop before I hit double digits in my years, and as soon as we were able we welcomed a Mac Performa into the family complete with dial up, IRC and Aldus PageMaker. I was happy, four eyed and headgeared typesetting and writing up a storm.

Sometime between IRC and Facebook Chat I abandoned writing, design and computer technology as a career for the more glamorous advertising sales. Let me be clear: advertising sales is incredibly fun and you can make a great living. You’ll never find more outgoing, brave and hard working people, particularly in radio. For six years I was a part of the media ad sales ranks and for the most part really loved it. Acting as a one woman CMO for small businesses suggesting creative, media and budget based on my research and experience genuinely felt like I was helping owners reach their dream of successful business ownership.

And I was. Kind of.

The thing is, you don’t build a Zagat rated restaurant serving menu items with half the ingredients and my hidden geek knew web technology needed to be included in these businesses’ marketing tasting menus. Facebook Connect! Better SEO! Mobile apps! WordPress! Content for days! CoTweet! Oh business owner, you need these things! They’re really great!

In fact, they’re so great I quit sales to focus on technology full time since I kept finding myself doing HTML tutorials at my desk for lunch and spending precious sales time fantasizing about the next big mobile device. HTML turned to CSS and PhotoShop turned to Illustrator and it was TTYN, sales, it’s not me, it’s you.

I’m not an expert on how to use web 2.0 tools optimally or what blogging platform is the best and I speak the industry language like a first day exchange student, I know. But much like that exchange student, I’m dying to know what you guys are talking about and I’ll read every book, website and online tutorial available to understand. Interestingly enough, every female oriented tech resource is focused on decorating girly colors, raising babies and shopping and it hasn’t helped enough.
So I built Shelbot.com because no one else was doing it. I’d like to think of it as tech test kitchen. Readers can have a good laugh over my sloppy code then switch gears to learn why Android is better than iOs… and let’s be real, understand what all of that word salad means.

Now this is just too long and is cutting into my sleep time. I hope you like Shelbot and if you don’t, feel free to go all Mel Gibson on me and give me an earful. My hope is that as I go through the process and post it to the site I can help you move toward a tech future you don’t hate.

But hey, geeks still go to the bar, right?