Rails - Feb 2005 - Is it my code or is it some hidden magic that causes this error?

I used a hack in 0.9.5 to get a model to be included consistently
throughout my application: I put a "load
''customer.rb''" at the top of
application.rb.  This is necessary for my session data to be valid for
each page.  For some reason, just ''require''ing it does not
work... If
I use ''require'', the app dies and the log says that it
couldn''t
reconstruct the data in the session because the Customer class doesn''t
exist.

Ok, so that''s my motivation for having a ''load''
statement.

Now, in 0.10, I get the following error when I load the page
http://dev.mytechsupport.com:1001/customer/info :

   NoMethodError in <controller not set>#<action not set>
   undefined method `const_available?'' for Customer:Class
   ./script/server:51

Why can''t it find the const_available? method if it expects it to
exist?  Is my forced ''load'' loading the model too early and
thus
messing up some magic later on?

Thank-you,
Duane Johnson
(canadaduane)