Another fine day at work. Sell a Hawaiian tour package, read up on the incoming Speaker of the House; quote an airfare to Shanghai, catch up with the latest San Francisco cultural oddities at Laughing Squid; revise several dozen stultifyingly dull yet insanely complex business itineraries, chat to people online; fill out lost ticket application, ponder the latest faxes on cheap holidays in Thailand; argue futilely with Federal Express about undelivered travel documents, amuse self by advising client to use famous historical dates as a mnemonic for remembering flight numbers ("You're on flight 1745: the Year of Revolution!"). I like my job because it affords me so much scope for laughter along with the opportunity to look like a genius. Someone is always wanting the impossible, and I'm forever delivering it.
Like today, for instance, when a fellow phoned who said he needed to stay in a hotel called the Shack. He didn't know what city it was in. He didn't know what the nearest airport was. He was pretty sure it was in Michigan, though. All he really knew was the name of the corporation he was going to visit.
Ladies and gentlemen, I found this man his hotel. The Shack Country Inn is located in Fremont, MI, not far from Muskegon. Thank you very much, enjoy the buffet, I'll be here all week. Okay, sure, it's not a job skill that's going to cure cancer or save the world, but it was like finding a needle in the haystack, and I was proud of myself. It makes me feel like I deserve my salary.
In between fending off calls about flights to Lake Tahoe (there aren't any, you have to fly into Reno) and insisting I was not the lady of the house to a persistent salesperson who kept trying all of our phone numbers, I loaded a new screensaver onto my computer. It looks wonderful when it's saving the screen with pretty pictures of coral reefs and fish. Unfortunately, it doesn't recognise poinking around on a browser as activity so it tries to save the screen if I've been looking things up on the Internet for too long. As soon as I start pounding the keyboard and shrieking, it instantly reverts to the active window, but it also does something bizarre to the colors. Green becomes aqua or burgundy, for instance. I can't quite figure out what it's doing. It's not simply inverting the color scheme; it's misinterpreting color in a random and arbitrary pattern. It's cool, yet annoying. All I can do is set the timer for longer and longer periods which somewhat defeats the instrinsic purpose.
By the end of the day I was worn out from the exigencies of tending to the Silicon Valley sales force as they flitted hither and yon around North America but I had a pleasant sense of accomplishment as I left the fish to save my screen, and padded off to catch my train.
