So I won an Xbox today. I never really win things, especially not big things, so this was kind of a really-cool-and-major-event in the life of Sam.

My school sent four people as representatives to an event run by Microsoft with a very lame title that I refuse to repeat on the internet, with the aim of encouraging teenage girls to consider a career in IT. So I made the trek with a couple of girls from my computer class to the Microsoft building in Sydney to attend. My first impression of the Microsoft building was that it smelled weird. It smelled like expensive carpet cleaner and new styrofoam, and something else I couldn’t place. There you have it, internet. The Microsoft Headquarters in Sydney smell weird – you heard it here first.

We were given a talk by the managing director of Microsoft in Australia, a woman by the first name of Pip, although I don’t remember her surname. We then had a mini careers panel with some of the university students currently doing internships at Microsoft. Then they split us into groups to rotate through three activities, and casually mentioned that they had an Xbox 360 with Kinect to give away to one girl who asked lots of questions and showed a passion for technology during the day. On the walk from the station to the building we had all been joking around that they should be giving us a free goods – a laptop or something, so we thought this was pretty funny, and decided, jokingly, that we had to win it. It got the group’s attention, though. Every person you passed for the rest of the day was discussing the Xbox, and people everywhere were sucking up to the employees in a desperate bid to be noticed and win it.

I didn’t actually try to suck up for the Xbox. I spent most of the workshops deep in conversation with one of the Microsoft employees about HTML and CSS and blogging and Silverlight and app design for the Windows 7 phone, and Internet Explorer 9, and RSS feeds, and all sorts of things. And apparently, they appreciated what I had to say, because Microsoft gave me an Xbox 360 with Kinect and a game. Proving once and for all that it pays to be a geek girl every now and then. Cool, hey?

As cool as it is, I have a dilemma. I’m not much of a gamer, and I’m debating whether I should keep or sell the Xbox. I’m  going to do a bit of research and see how many games that I’m honestly interested in I can get for it, but it’s quite likely that I’ll sell it online. I want some opinions, though. Should I keep it or sell it – tell me in the comments.

I enjoyed the day at Microsoft, and while they reached the goal of their program by awakening some new passions to learn different programming languages in me, they failed their ultimate goal of getting people to want to work at Microsoft. While I think it would be an awesome place to work, and the people there were lovely – heck, even though the job of Developer Evangelist sounds amazing, which is basically to be passionate about and spread your passion about technology and code, overall, Microsoft felt like a bit of an empty company. Obviously I’m not talking about the entire company of Microsoft, but just the jobs they had at the centre I went to, but it felt like there was no real creating happening there. They marketed and enthused and made things for fun, and worked with the technologies they all loved, but there was very little actual designing and developing that went on there. I suppose it made me realize that I’ll never be happy just on the sidelines of IT. I want to create things. I want to develop and design and be behind actual physical results, not just responsible for some figure in marketing them. I don’t want to inspire people by  showing them all of this wonderful stuff – I want to inspire people by creating that amazing stuff.

I spent the afternoon and evening watching my brothers attempt ballroom dancing at a competition for primary school dancers, so I posted this quite late. As such, I’ll return all of your lovely comments tomorrow – I haven’t forgotten you! Have a great first of April (and no, I didn’t just prank you with the Xbox thing. I actually won an Xbox. Seriously.)