the daily shout out

Good Morning! Melbourne, Westcourt, Tallin, Vilnius, Zebbug, Eyguieres, Dewsbury,Illescas, Rio Branco, Hallifax and everyone in the US from Honolulu to Portland! As a person who hasn't had the privilege of traveling outside of the United States (or inside it much, for that matter) I am fascinated by the placenames and imagined lives of the people who visit my blog. I'm quite likely to wind up paying to continue using the NeoEarth widget that appears in my sidebar. Imagine, someone from Malta has dropped by recently. I have become a computer chair traveler. Someday, I may just get a passport. Many years ago I was telephone operator and I always loved the opportunity of getting someone an international, person to person phone call. How many of you even remember having an operator handle a call for you? Many of the women I worked with had a great deal of stress from that job. I faced the fact early on that nobody calls the operator to tell her to "Have a nice day!" so I rarely took the daily quota of abuse personally. When I was moved into the customer service and sales arena it got a lot worse. For a long time after I left that position I missed conversations that started out with "BITCH!". I'm one of those lucky persons who was blessed with a good phone voice so I took each confrontational caller as an opportunity at lion taming sans chair and whip. I usually won the toss. Yep, the board I worked in 1971 looked just like this one. Hello World!