Some dreams

I've been having dreams these past few weeks. It's not that unusual for me to have dreams, or even to remember them the next day, but the frequency with which this is happening lately is a little unusual.

The other day I dreamt I was at work. I had gotten the news I was being cut, but it wouldn't be for two weeks, until after a vacation. (In reality I was planning to take the last week of March off to work on the house, but I never got a chance to put in for the days.) So I was walking around the plant on a sort of farewell tour, talking with people I had gotten to know over the last 15 years. (This is something I never got a chance to do - I was packed and out of the plant within an hour of getting the news.) At one point I walked past a room filled with projects that I had not quite finalized yet. Hundreds of them. Unfinished business.

It is true that I left a lot of unfinished business behind. Several of my projects were in process at that time; actually, I had just commented to someone that we had been much busier in the first two months of 2007 than we had been in a long while. But there were also projects that I had never received final approval for. In most processes the final product is delivered, accepted, and approved. With us the final project is delivered - and then may or may not be used to produce discs that are immediately reviewed and accepted or rejected. Most of the time I had to follow-up with clients after a reasonable amount of time* to make sure they were happy with their product, or scour my e-mail records for "hidden" approvals tucked in other e-mails. There are a lot of projects from earlier in the year that I never got to do that for.

Last night I stayed over at the house of some friends. I had at least two dreams there. In one, I awoke in their guest bedroom and decided to watch some TV. The television was mounted on a swing arm, something like a television at a hospital, only the swing arm was made of wood, in keeping with the design of their house. I watched an episode of Star Trek (the original series) that was pretty cool and pretty complicated. It took me a while to remember that my friends do not have a TV in their guest bedroom, certainly not one with a wooden swing-arm mount, and that the episode of Star Trek I was watching did not actually exist, even though it was pretty cool.

The other dream was a bit more standard: I remembered that I had been taking a full semester load of college classes, and I had not been to any of them for nearly two weeks, and I had certainly missed some tests. Would I be able to make this up somehow? Then I remembered that I have not taken any college courses in nearly 20 years, and one of the Professors who figured prominently in my dream had been dead for nearly 10 years.

So. I just got back from the Emergency Room - I was with a friend whose father is being admitted.** Now I'm a little tired. I wonder if I'll have dreams tonight.

*So what's a "reasonable amount of time"? We once had a client reject something based on a handful of consumer complaints nine months after they had officially accepted it, for an alleged "defect" that was not detectable by any normal means. We had to pull out all the stops, rush through a re-do (using new assets they had to supply to us, since the alleged "defect" was in one of their assets), and then deliver the new version of their project via international courier, the most expensive way to do this. Several years later, when they were reviewing some bills they were considering paying, they found this courier bill and refused to pay it, even though they had specifically demanded the courier service.

**Perhaps I shall make it my goal in life to pass out soap and toothpaste to people in dollar stores and Emergency Room waiting areas. Because, damn.