Glitches and Switches

The vision we have for this machine that we are building is that it will open up the widest range of tailored choices for the international traveler to experience South Africa. This is not an easy undertaking, as we have explained before. Personal lives and computer hardware going on the blink add to our list of problem solving tasks as we endeavor to get the website ready for its launch in a few weeks time. We are realizing the value of teamwork and team building. It has become necessary to get another mind on board and we are in the process of finding a person who has the right one. They will need to work under pressure and design their own schedule to an extent. They will have to be young, vibrant and able to occasionally rescue their personal belongings from the dog. They will also have to have a kind of higher- order cognition, enabling them to envision what anyone out of a full spectrum of international travelers might possibly want from a visit to South Africa, and help them find it, before they've even started looking.

This is why we have been so busy with our database. Gradually, it is filling up with bits of information that represent places and potential experiences. Kind of like an hourglass in reverse, the dream machine we are building will facilitate unforgettable moments in the future for people we have never met. We hope that they will go home enriched by our land and tell their friends about how it all started; with just a few simple mouse clicks.

It all sounds very easy, but we must remember that travelers are people who have chosen to leave their comfort zones. For that reason, they are at least slightly removed from the set of social norms which help them assimilate their experiences. To us, it seems that travelers experience things on a deeper level than those who don't get out much. We can't pretend that the problems we experience as South Africans go unnoticed by international visitors. It may be that negative incidents leave a more lasting impression on them than they would on a resident, or even a different kind of impression, one which residents might find it hard to relate to.
We have thought about this issue and realized that we are in a position to assist visitors who would otherwise have no one to turn to in the unlikely event of stumbling across one of the less pleasant aspects of South African life. This is why part of our machine's functionality, its human face, is a Premium Assistance Line - a hotline for users to contact us for help of any kind. This means anything from helping them to find their favorite brand of toothpaste or a good Portuguese restaurant, to coordinating a response to an emergency.

Facing challenges is a great way of developing the repertoire for overcoming new challenges, and we are happily dealing with the ones we have now, knowing that we are equipping ourselves to deal better with future ones. We are resolving the challenges we have taken upon ourselves so that the experience of traveling is burdened by as few problems as possible and the deep experiences users are left with are positive and memorable ones.