Is this the real life?

Rabid dives into the world of virtual reality

After barely surviving our last foray into the latest technology, with Rabid’s good name ruined by images of desperate and dateless donkeys on GooTube, it was with understandable trepidation that we took the plunge yet again, this time into the world of virtual reality.

We figured the worst that could happen would be going virtually broke, which is surely less painful than the real thing. Surely.

The only game in town for serious virtual reality people is Second Life, so that’s where we headed, to open Virtually Rabid Reseller.

For starters, nobody explained you need to use real money to play in this virtual world. You’ve got to send some hard-earned to the dudes who run this online game/world/goldmine and they send you some of their funny money, which you can use inside the game. Now why didn’t we think of this – where’s that so-called online genius of a nephew?

Once we’d forked out for some game cash we found out who’s really making money here when we were offered extra game cash for recruiting more losers – oops – users, to Second Life.

If this isn’t some sort of cash cow why would they be offering a reward just to get bums on seats?

We are reasonably confident it is too late to start our own Rabid Life virtual world, but we’ve grabbed the domain name just in case things change. You can never be quite sure just where things are virtually heading.

The next thing we discovered is we couldn’t afford to open a shop in the best part of virtual town, but then we can’t afford a shop in the best part of reality town either, so some things about Second Life were eerily familiar.

Instead we bought a virtual shop we could virtually afford, acquired some virtual furnishings and waited around for some virtual customers. And waited. And waited. And waited. This was not virtual reality at all. This is no different from real reality.

When at last some virtual customers wandered into the virtual shop and started looking at the virtual products, they outnumbered the customers that had wandered through Rabid’s real shop that day.

After virtually haggling with the virtual customers over the virtual price of a virtual laptop computer, we managed to complete our first virtual sale.

At this juncture we calculated our break-even point would be sometime in the next millennium.

Since we weren’t going to get rich any time soon, even virtually, we decided to sell the virtual shop and take our virtual money to the virtual bank, exchange it for real hard cash, then get some sleep.

Bingo! We got twice what we paid for the shop after only owning it for a few days! So that’s what this is all about! It’s the real estate boom you have when you can’t convince the real world to pay you over the odds for your decrepit slum.

Virtually Rabid Realty is virtually open for virtual business. This time we must be onto a winner. Surely.

Gotta go! Customers waiting!