How I Use the Interactive Map to Find Companions Nearby

A gentleman's notes on a small tool that turned out useful

There's a map on the agency's site I turn to most evenings before I decide anything else, an interactive one, showing companions by their current location. I open it wherever I happen to be, a hotel, an office, somewhere the day has left me without much warning.

A Rating, a Number, and Whatever's Behind It

Each mark on the map belongs to someone nearby. Touching it brings up her photo and a rating in stars, along with a number next to it, pulled from the reviews clients leave across the site. I've started clicking through to that number more than I expected to, since it opens straight into her profile and whatever people have said there. Once, that led me to a review mentioning a bar neither of us had been to, a place she'd suggested herself according to the review, and that ended up being most of the evening.

A route sits under all of it, worked out the moment I tap for one, on foot or by car, from wherever I happen to be standing.

Distance, Sooner Rather Than Later

There was a period, before I paid the map much attention, when I'd pick someone and only find out afterward that she was forty minutes off rather than five. Odd way to end an evening that had started well. These days the distance is just there, on the card, before I've settled on anyone.

My own hours rarely hold their shape past four in the afternoon, and by evening I'm often somewhere I hadn't planned to be that morning. Kensington some weeks, Marylebone others, wherever the day happens to leave me.

A meeting finished early on me not long ago, sooner than I'd planned, and with a flight the next morning I wasn't looking for a long night either way. Someone a few streets from the hotel had a rating I liked the look of. I clicked through, read what people had said, thought it over for a minute, maybe less, and left.

I've been using the map for a while now. Most weeks I don't think about it much at all.