Does technology ignite passion...or vice versa?

Today is my 8th birthday at Business Mechanix.  When I went to work this morning, Wayne asked me if i was going to do anything special.  I didn't think I would, but I decided to do something to celebrate.  Today I went back to the first emails I ever sent when I started 8 years ago.  I simply smiled.  Here is an extract:-  It was sent at 8.49am in the morning:-

 

Hey Steve,

Good to hear from you- sounds like you are having a really good time.

I'm currently suffering from e-mail withdrawal at the moment- I only had 2 e-mails yesterday and yours is the only one in my in-box today!......

 

Stephen Brown- (ex PeopleSoft) this is a shout out to you- thanks for keeping me busy on my first few days at work with Business Mechanix, 8 years ago!

 

I fast forward to the present day, things feel like they move at the speed of light.  My social media updates constantly reminding me that other people are already out at dinner somewhere divine because they have posted an update from their smart-phone to facebook.  And then there is the constant barrage of emails from the automation of our CRM system, keeping us totally up to date with what is going on with almost every aspect of our business.  We didn't even have a filing cabinet with customer files when I started 8 years ago, and now we have one of the most sophisticated CRM systems I have ever seen!

 

So I have to smile this evening. I'm still sitting here still at work at 8.00pm in the evening with 3 others trying to work out how we remove the penis off a robot.  Yes, you read it correctly.  We are trying to work out the best way to graphically gender neutralise an image our Graphic Designer has been creating for us.  Does that sound slightly odd to you?  It was at my request actually. 

We are working on a new logo and brand we are creating for a new product line we are launching next month.  I said that any logo we have needs to be gender neutral.  Why is it that everyone assumes robots are male?  Perhaps its all the movies we have watched about them, they all seam to have male specific names, like Wall-E, CHIP, Otis or something similar.  I even looked up Wikipedia and went through the entire list of fictional robots. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_robots_and_androids

 

Did you know the only girl robot I could find in this Wikipedia Reference was from 2012!!!! Little girl robot Molly in "Metal Molly" by Ariadne Tampion (2012)!  Now, no offence to the creator of Metal Mollie, but seriously, that is not the staunchest female robot I have ever seen.  I must admit, I had to look pretty hard as on first glance I actually though it was a girl with braces on her legs, not a robot.  I'm sure in this day and age, its time we had a staunch female robot. Now that I've just determined this useful fact, there are no well-known famous female robots, I must add this to my bucket list, come up with one, perhaps with a little more....attitude!

So I then come to the point at why I am still working at this time of the evening on my 8th anniversary, shouldn't I be out celebrating?.  I am here working on our new product line, with the others in the team dedicated to this cause.  It is a highly technical project and very futuristic.  The reason I am here is that I am passionate and technology excites me....and looking at it from the outside, I must admit I do find it very odd that I end up working on projects removing genitalia on robots late into the evening with the team, but this is probably the reason I do what I do.  I love running a technology company, its fresh, exciting and new.  What a brilliant industry to be in!

 

So for those of you reading this, this is what I'm trying to work out is this- Is it technology that ignites passion, or the other way around- passion ignites technology?