Friday at work was relatively mellow despite one of the agents being gone on holiday. I spent my time repairing various pieces of office equipment and generally making myself useful. One thing I like to do is go through the agency's traveler profiles to see who our regulars are. I was delighted to learn we have a client named Dick Daft. He is a redhead with a belligerent attitude, apparently. We also have a Nigerian tribal chief who requires the title Chief on all his airline tickets. This just tickles me no end.

Another thing I did was call around to get quotes on modems and ISPs so we can get our office on the Internet and using email as soon as possible. I have a Mac at home, but at work we have some fairly antique PCs on which American Airlines (who owns them) has turned all the good stuff off. No sound card, no 256 colors, no useful applications other than Sabre and Windows 3.1. We're due to be upgraded to Pentiums and Win95, but I'm not holding my breath. American Airlines are glacially slow in upgrading small offices like ours. For now, if I get stuck on hold with some airline reservation system and I've caught up on my paperwork, my only distraction is playing Solitaire. I'm really good at Solitaire. It's very boring. I might have to invest in some games for our computers. I tried installing a Coral Reef screen saver, but with only 16 bits of color, it looked hideous so I took it off. That'll change when we get the new system, fortunately.

I never run out of things to do, even without the Internet to play on. I can always sort through the endless faxes we get and pull out the agent fam trips. Fam trips are familiarization trips, extremely low-cost holidays designed to help an agency sell a destination. They really work: I'm very big on Iceland and Ecuador as a result of my fam trips there. Ditto with Bermuda and Las Vegas, although those were working fams where I had to do eight hotel inspections in one day and went home the next. I don't really want to do a working fam again. I like the ones where you're invited to just experience the destination as though you were a client. That's how I managed to go to Africa with my husband for approximately 1/3 the normal cost, and that's how I hope to get to the Galapagos Islands next year. But I wouldn't turn down a really good deal to Central America, especially Costa Rica, or something short and sweet in the Caribbean. Mainly, though, I'm pawing through the faxes looking for a cruise. I need to go on one. I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but I never have been on one. Cruises are the easiest and most lucrative travel package to sell, and most people who take them are repeat customers. It makes me feel stupid not to know first-hand what they're like, so I'm going to try to do at least a little three day trip to the Bahamas if nothing else.