Dinner was three big sticks of celery and peanut butter. Crunch, crunch. Very satisfying. I pretended they were the bones of my clients. Getting your ticket reissued for the fourth time in an hour because you can't make up your mind? Crunch, crunch. Angry at us because you can't find the hotel we booked at your request? Crunch, crunch. Blaming us for not reading your mind and realizing you did, in fact, plan to attend the sales meeting? Crunch, crunch. Requesting faxed copies of your itinerary every week because you can't be bothered to keep track of the originals we send in the mail? Snap.

Oh, don't mind me. I'm just a bit frazzled by our corporate clients this week. It feels like they've been especially whiny and unreasonable, but I think my workload is most of the problem, and generally they work well with us. Corporate travel is uninteresting and insanely detail oriented at the same time, a deadly combination for me. It hasn't been a terrible week, really. I got to book lots of Hawaii and Mexico packages, which was a nice alternative to searching for a cheap hotel near the Houston Galleria. As long as I get a reasonable percentage of leisure bookings to perk me up I can cope with the others.

I'm a leisure agent at heart. There are definitely agents who prefer the cut and dried corporate work, but not me. The reason I like leisure travel is I get to tell people about how much fun it is where they're going. I also try to steer people away from destinations they're going to dislike. I'm enthusiastic about Mexico but I know when it won't work for someone's vacation, and I can discern which Hawaiian island will suit a client best within five minutes of talking to them. Someone might be willing to spend a lot of money but not feel comfortable with the five star luxury of a Four Seasons and be happier going to a less posh place. I love figuring this out. It's like playing a game where everyone's the winner.

Because I've been typing way so much at work I've meant to come home and relax away from the computer every night this week but it hasn't worked out that way. You may recall that I'm a MOO enthusiast, and that I got my start on one called the Digiverse. The DV, as we called it, was taken down in June of 1995 and I haven't seen it since, although I've remained close friends with quite a few people I met there. Well, I ran into the guy who owns the database it's stored in, and he agreed to put it up for a few days where everyone could log in. And that's what I've been doing: logging in to the Digiverse and gathering descriptions, verbs, objects, and other data for my files.

I'm delighted to get my hands on the shell, the context if you will, of that wonderful, unique virtual world which changed my life in so many ways. Boy, is it nostalgic to go home again. Boy, is that version of the core db antiquated. I'm working fast, making people leave me alone while I @dump everything I can find. fRiNgE, the owner, wouldn't put it up for me before when I asked him, so I'm taking advantage of his sudden, inexplicable willingness to let everyone visit. I'm not going to recreate it all on ElderMOO, the place we ex-Digiverse people socialize at now, but I will use some of the old social verbs we miss that I and my co-wizard Spindizzy originally wrote at the DV. Mostly, though, I'll have it on my hard drive where I can look at everything without having to wait on someone else's goodwill.

Tomorrow night it'll be taken back down, and that little window of opportunity will snap shut again, but I'll be happily going through the logs and remembering the good old days of 1995.

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