Remember Hotel Window Woman? She thought I did such a splendid job with her Seattle trip that she asked me to plan her grand tour of Canada. I can't tell you how much this moves me. I'm considering coming down with a deadly disease so I don't have to phone every hotel in Canada to ask about the windows, the square footage, the room decorations, and the likelihood of rain.
Then I heard from Fabio.
"Ciao bella, Lucia, thees ees-a Fabio," a warm, sexy voice said on the phone.
"Yo, Fabio, wassupwitchu?" I said drily, wondering which of my clients was having me on.
"What?" Fabio said, still in a heavy Italian accent. "You repeat for me pleece?"
"You mean this really is Fabio?" I said, somewhat taken aback. Gosh, model turned romance author Fabio, calling me? It could happen. I once booked a ticket for Don McLean, you know. And Tommy Boyce was a particular friend of mine. I've hobnobbed with the greats, oh yeah.
"Si, Lucia, si! Eet's-a me, Fabio Giglio. You remember me, eh?" he replied warmly.
Ah. Not the Large Chested One, then. And of course I don't have a clue who this other Fabio is, but I haven't served the public for decades without learning how to pull off a fast recovery.
"Fabio, it's been a long time!" I said smoothly. "Of course I remember you, you bum. You never write, you never call, you never bring me flowers anymore. There's another agent, isn't there?"
"Oho, Lucia, you know me so well," he said, delighted by our fabulous repartee. "I go to deefferent agency for awhile, they no treat me like you do. I'm-a back!"
Wa, as they say, hoo.
But the highlight of my day was getting lectured by a United Airlines agent for not knowing United internal procedures. After this little snirp gave me lip (because I had changed a client's flights and somehow their side of the computer barfed it back up), I kept my dignity, if not my temper, intact. I asked her to can the lecture and fix the problem without assigning blame. She kept trying to get me to say everything I'd done was wrong, which wasn't, in fact, the case at all. It was a computer-generated error. You'd think in our industry this wouldn't be either a surprise or an insurmountable problem.
"I'll tell you what," I said with enormous forbearance and an incredibly phony-sweet voice. "How about I just call back and get another agent who would rather help our mutual client than insist on being right?" Incensed, she took a big breath to prepare for delineating all my sins, at which point I hung up. Jeez louise. The next agent was really nice. We got the client squared away.
After which, I shredded a bagel into little, tiny, eensy, weensy pieces and stabbed them with my plastic knife several times for good measure. Don't ever lecture me unless you're my boss or my dad. I'm a dangerous woman with utensils.
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