Be Kind Rewind: Universum Awards & Årets ITtjej 2014

Have you ever been in a situation where it feels like you’re floating 3 meters above everyone else looking down at yourself?

It has happened to me several times lately. Thursday the 6th of March during Universum Awards was one of those times. But before getting to the floating part I will try to take you back to that night.

The heart beats in a rate significantly above normal. I have this illusionary ball o feelings in my stomach, it is a ball I have learned to recognized and love, the prefect mix of excitement and absolut fear. I look down at the massive piece of meat on my plate, it is seriously the size of a building brick. I want to eat it, it looks delicious.Especially after my one week long forced egg diet (due to lack of time and my general haters attitude towards cooking). But I can’t chew. I am too nervous. Microsoft has the table next to the stage and I am almost face to face with the comedian up on the stage, right now she makes fun of herself and people from Östergötland. Several prices has already been given out to exceptionally good but also calm student, how can they be so calm? There are only 200 head of HR people from the biggest companies in Sweden in the audience.

I take a sip of my wine and turn to my left. There sits Robert, Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Evangelism Lead for Europe. ”How can I entertain this person?” occupies my mind. I take another sip of the wine.

It turns out that Robert built his own airplane and ”flies it from time to time”, how cool? I don’t have anything to versus with. I am trying to build a simulation of bouncing balls but at the moment it looks like an epileptic hippie version of keno… I skipped to mentioned that and instead stayed with the airplane theme. I told Robert about my trip to Iraq last fall, always an ice breaker.

Something is happening on the stage. The award IT-girl of the year is about to be announced. Heart freeze. I hear Therese form Microsoft read the nomination and I hear MY name. The song ”You better Work Bitch” with Britney Spears starts playing loudly from the speakers and Sofie Lindblom is asked to come up on stage. About here Super Sofie takes over and I float up some where closer to the roof looking down, still with a speeding heartbeat, but safely surrounded by the chandeliers at Berns. Here I can even laugh at the irony of Universum picking to play that particular song. Because I worked so hard to get to where I am today. The ”bitch” part you have to ask my fellow projects groups about.

I don’t remember what Super Sofie said on stage, something about that winning the award feels like being Ronja Rövardotter succeeding in jumping over the gap to Birk’s side(?). But what I remember is that she smiled. Because as I said in my cover letter for the competition:

and know I can do exactly that. Still smiling by the way. A big thank you to all the people I have had the honor to meet and all the things I had the chance to do.

I frankly never felt more happy and alive.