Microsoft employee worries about INQ reporter

MAYBE it was my red tie with Tux the Linux mascot. What do you think?

OK, it was my tie. It probably identified me as the "enemy" to Redmondians. But everyone else seemed at the moment to pay little attention to my visit. All I was doing was moving around Expocomm, finding bits of info and snapping pics.

Until I made a few turns around the Vole's booth, and snapped a couple pictures of their location. It wasn't too late or too early, just 2:47pm. I'm a StarOffice user from the days it was a product from a small German company, and I run a mixed Windows+Linux environment I really was not interested in what they had to offer as far as Office Live Meeting is concerned.

But when I came home and started browsing at the pictures, I zoomed in and noticed something. Hey! There was someone snooping at me with terrified eyes, just behind some fake bushes! The moment I took the pic, I just noticed her standing there next to a door doing nothing, with the corner of my eye. But I didn't notice her look or what she was doing, just focused on the focus - pardon the redundancy - and snapped the pic. See the zoomed image below:

I can see you! Why the worried look for someone snapping pics at an empty booth?
[We'll have no stalking at the INQ, F. Ed.]

If she was in fact an employee of the Redmond Juggernaut, she surely looked concerned. What do you think? If that's the case, see what kind of power something as simple as a Tux tie has, that it puts some Microsoft employees in paranoid mode! All notebooks are secured at these kind of events so that's probably not a reason either. But then, maybe she wasn't a Microsoft employee. I asked four independent observers "what do you think this woman is doing in this pic?". All four concluded "she's sneaking up on the person taking the picture". Why didn't she talk to me? I don't know. I respect people, even if they look like sneaky Microsoft employees.

He didn't bother about my picture taking

Or maybe there was a terrible secret in there in danger of being unveiled?. Like some product being strikingly similar to ages-old Lotus Sametime? Or maybe there was no one! Just like the scenario inside the empty Microsoft Office Live Meeting booth! µ

NB Truth be told, the same booth was quite active with a dozen people watching a recorded demo on Thrusday afternoon when I visited the booth again. Still, if you know the name and affiliation of the woman behind the bushes, drop me a line, I'm still trying to find out what was so suspicious. [It was you, Ed.] In fact, I'm beginning to think that anyone even innocently looking from behind such decoration ends up looking sneaky, so maybe the moral of the story will be making the Vole rethink their decoration next year.