<story><title>Seriously, stop with the booth babes</title><url>http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rt452e6onIcJ:www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog/2011/09/seriously-stop-with-the-booth-babes/+http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog/2011/09/seriously-stop-with-the-booth-babes/&amp;cd=1&amp;hl=en&amp;ct=clnk&amp;gl=us</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>blahedo</author><text>I&apos;m getting the impression from reading the other comments that most of the commenters just skimmed the article (or perhaps didn&apos;t read it at all, and drew assumptions from the title).  If you need a tl;dr, or if you read it quickly, this is the most important line in the post:&lt;p&gt;&amp;#62; &lt;i&gt;What you end up with is the situation where you, as a conference goer, walk up to a booth and, because you’re no stranger to how this works, ignore any attractive woman and talk directly to a male at the booth. You assume immediately that any attractive female is there simply for their physical appearance, not for the value that their knowledge brings.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is not an abstract PC idea of feeling bad about objectifying the booth babe, or wishing to avoid temptation, or whatever.  This is a very specific problem that is harmful to the industry and to all the &lt;i&gt;non-&lt;/i&gt;booth babes out there.  The OP goes on to make some suggestions on how to work towards fixing the problem, but please, if you&apos;re going to comment on this, make sure you understand the actual main point first.</text></comment>
<story><title>Seriously, stop with the booth babes</title><url>http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rt452e6onIcJ:www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog/2011/09/seriously-stop-with-the-booth-babes/+http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog/2011/09/seriously-stop-with-the-booth-babes/&amp;cd=1&amp;hl=en&amp;ct=clnk&amp;gl=us</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>shawnee_</author><text>Learned this the hard way.  Back when LinuxCon was still called LinuxCon, I made the mistake of making a beeline to the first &quot;booth&quot; I saw that was manned by a fellow female.  I studied the setup, ascertained what kind of hardware being shown off by this particular vendor, and proceeded to inquire along the line of shop talk.&lt;p&gt;Although I don&apos;t remember exactly what I asked her, this was the gist of our exchange.&lt;p&gt;BB:  &quot;It&apos;s 2X faster!&quot;  (Vanna White, preening the chipset)&lt;p&gt;Me:  &quot;Faster than what?&quot;&lt;p&gt;She appears panicked and quickly reads over the spec sheet  behind her booth.  Finally, after a minute, she looks up and says  &quot;It&apos;s just . . . faster.&quot;&lt;p&gt;Dear companies, giving the BBs a script isn&apos;t enough if they don&apos;t understand what the metrics on the script actually mean.</text></comment>