reflections of a booth babe - part 1

One week ago, I was on my journey en femme attending the world's largest ham radio convention in Dayton, Ohio.

I have had a few days to reflect on my experience and have some thoughts to share. Part One of those thoughts follow.

I wish I had spent more time away from our booth. I visited some other booths, made a short trip into the flea market, but I did not attend any forums.

I confess that on the first day of the convention, I was a little fearful about interacting with strangers and felt safer ensconced in our booth.

I spent the morning of Day One working in the "background" of our booth assisting the guys who were on the firing line interacting with customers.

In the afternoon, the firing line got busier, so I stepped up and began interfacing with the customers. They had questions and wanted information about our products. They did not care who was delivering that information and I quickly felt comfortable in the role of dispensing that information.

Being the only booth babe in our booth, I noticed that I was attracting customers away from the booth boys. Some of our customers actually held off dealing with the boys and waited patiently for their turn to talk with me. So, I thoroughly enjoyed the afternoon as the booth babe

On the second day, I had to put out a fire in our booth.

We were running low on one of our most popular brochures. We had a printer in our booth (for customer orders and receipts), but we only had 8.5-by-11-inch paper, whereas the brochure required 8.5-by-14-inch paper, So I had to reformat the original 8.5-by-14 format to an 8.5-by-11-inch format.

The original was a Powerpoint creation; I seldom work in Powerpoint, so I also had to port the information into an application I am familiar with (Adobe InDesign) to create the newly formatted brochure.

Of course, I was interrupted numerous times to help out in the booth. As a result, it took about two hours to convert the brochure and before I knew it, the morning was over. I left our booth a few times in the afternoon to visit other booths, but time was running out and I probably visited less that 1/4 of the booths at the convention.

I wish I could do it all over again; I guess there is always next year!