Getting To Grips With The New Me…

The first few hours were all about blundering around and getting to grips with being an avatar. I learnt to walk, to fly, to move the avatar to see things.. I fell in oceans and storm water drains, fell off objects, bumped into people, buildings and things in general.. I’m so glad bruises don’t show there!

Learnt how to search for things and to teleport there – and as long as I didn’t have to move when I got there things were fine.. I even started to feel comfortable with the body I inhabited – ok, I lie, but I did learn to almost walk in a straight line using the on screen controls… I discovered the cup of coffee I’d dropped on the keyboard a few weeks before had made the keys stick – so onscreen controls worked a lot better than the keyboard…

I even went window shopping… and had the luck to end up in a furniture shop that has the only human greeter I have ever met.. We chatted and she gave me a note on things called money trees – trees that have cash on them that only newbies can have. She also gave me a necklace.. was completely enchanted by it.. I had bling! Until then I’d never considered myself bling girl.. but now I know my avatar motto is – “mmmmm shiny!”

So now I had a purpose.. which was good, as I was getting bored. I’d missed the induction on Help Island, so I didn’t land in my assigned welcome area and didn’t know a soul… Had I done so, things may have been different – although I doubt it.

So I set off on the shallow pursuit of money. Had to visit a few places before a) I discovered what a money tree looked like and b) worked out what money looked like. Still more staggering and bumping into people and things… What really got me was the falling into water. I was soooo sick of it by this time.. Couldn’t tell the difference between land and water, but then I obviously still can’t, as I ended up in a canal again today – thought it was a road…

My last stop that night in the pursuit of money was a nightclub. Too dim to realise it for what it was then, but the limitations of my pc became apparent. The lag was terrible, stuff wouldn’t rezz and on top of that, I still couldn’t move the avatar in anything but jerky movements.. so I fell off the walkway, fell into the canals, walked into walls and generally looked like a psychotic drunk.. but finally made it into the club…

That was the first time I’d seen chat en-mass.. my head span…. The lag was terrible, so I couldn’t even walk.. There was so much chatter that my mind completely glazed over and I just stood there stunned..

Then I received an IM asking me if I wanted help… that’s when my second life began to take on a whole new meaning..