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Show 69 experience like the one in Saint Louis. She looked for the man who was going to make the introductions. "I buttonholed him beforehand," Karen says, "and I told him, 'Now I viant a straight introduction - ho crap!" She thought she'd been foreeful enough, but the man evidently didn't believe her. He ended her introduction viith, "Karen Eckels... you'll really like her blue eyes." And when he introduced the next man on the team, he said, "Now t h i s guy really likes blue eyes!" Karen was no longer as spineless as she'd been the year before. "I was not going to put up viith that sort of anti-professional put-down," she says. "He didn't make any sort of garbage comments like that about any of the men. I not only told him-what Itthought, I l e t several other people knovi vihat had happened. It even ended up in a viritten report that we objected to the viay he conducted that introduction." Younger men, Karen notes, are not nearly as condescending in their attitudes toward her. I t ' s the men viho have been viorking in the agencies since long before viomen were hired to do nontraditional, professional work who don't knovi hovi to accept viomen in managerial roles. Like Janey McDowell, Karen grew more confident as her experience increased. As a result of her instructive appearances, more and more users requested data from Firebase. Additional information was fed into the system, increasing i t s value to users. As word of the data bank spread, requests for information came not only from the United States, but from all parts of the world. The following diligently translated l e t t er arrived from the Netherlands: |