Post-Easter holiday holiday yesterday, I settled down into SL while my mother toddled off to visit friends, I got a few things done....
... and then I got one of those Phone Calls You Do Not Want To Get; my mother calling me on her mobile to say she'd fallen at the end of our street, couldn't get up, and would I come and get her?
It was the work of mere moments to get down to where she was sitting on the ground nursing her arm, and even fewer moments to phone for an ambulance. (I will be berating her for not phoning the emergency services immediately, but I'll be saving that for when she's completely recovered.) Even with the best efforts of the NHS (not for the first time, I thanked God and Nye Bevan for that institution), though, it took a while for her to be patched up, her dislocated elbow put back into shape, monitored for the sedatives they gave her, and finally discharged. She returned home, rather in the attitude of Napoleon returning from Elba, shortly after midnight.
And, once she was settled with all her necessities (soft pillows, cocoa, painkillers for emergencies and copy of Mansfield Park), I returned to my computer, planning to leave a short message to people to explain where I'd been... only to find out I was still logged in to SL.
Shortly before I got the phone call, you see, I'd started a session at a fishing spot for the 7Seas game... and I had enabled the "auto-casting" feature which makes you cast your rod for fish automatically, without human intervention... and, it turns out, this is enough to stop you being logged out due to inactivity. So, while the real me had been phoning ambulances and pacing hospital corridors and talking to a nurse with a bolt through her neck, I had also been engaged in an act of epic fishery rarely seen outside the writings of Ernest Hemingway. Some time ago, I had stocked up on a quantity of bait equal to "all any person could reasonably need for a long time to come", and I had burned through most of it during the session. No interruptions, no region restarts, nothing to disturb the even tenor of SL... it was a long and generally successful session; I only wish I'd been there.
I grabbed a very late lunch and ate it one-handed while declining fish and answering IMs with the other... I had to send apologies, after all, to all the people I'd inadvertently snubbed while AFK! I don't know if I actually got the thing I was fishing for, though, or whether it was just lost in a long succession of unacknowledged inventory offers... I shall find out soon enough, I suppose!
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