Dream XXXII

At work, one of my colleagues was putting up a structure to control cables when he did something and we lost all power to the servers. Even the various UPS units we had didn’t kick in. Grumbling about the cable management job our boss had given him, he undid what he had done and the servers began to come back on line.

An annoying concierge person came in, and so did two audio visual technicians. It seemed that while our servers had enough power, everywhere else at work had no power. My colleague went off to find out what was going on, and returned with some sandwiches and some jars of chocolate milk (the jars still had cocoa powder on them). However, he wouldn’t tell me what was going on.

I went down to the employee recreation area, and everyone in the office followed (they brought the sandwiches). Since there was a sort of pond area there, I took off my shoes and socks and wandered around, trying to find out what was going on.

I met a woman from another department, and she said that the power to the whole city seemed to be affected. She said she was going home, and that sounded like a good idea to me. We crossed the road and she started to go another way, so I asked her where she lived and she pointed the direction she was heading. (I lived in the opposite direction.) She then asked if I’d like to come home with her.

I told her I would, but I had to go back for my shoes and socks. So I went back, going through the company toy story, which seemed to have nothing but McDonald’s Happy Meal prizes and toys based on the animated movie Robots. I went back to the pond, but I was on the other side from where my shoes were. I thought I would wade across a path that was just below the surface, but that led to a high wall, so I turned back and went around the pond.

I found my shoes on top of a box that was filled with water. A friendly dog was nearby, so I petted him and put my shoes on. There was a table nearby where my co-workers were sitting before, but they’d left and taken the sandwiches with them.

I sat down at an enormous teletype machine and was going to leave them a note, but the machine was so noisy I stopped. I looked at the paper I was printing on, and it was already filled with words, some of them hand-written.

Then, I took out my laptop and started a tutorial on Adobe Illustrator. Remembering the woman, I stopped the program and descended a huge set of rickety stairs, all suspended in the middle of the air, and met her on a narrow strip of lawn that spanned an enormous abyss.