Two disclaimers and a dream... in These titles mean nothing.

or wait I’m like the dog and the squirrel in the fb meme - I am the soul of sincerity and something else that starts with s and then I see a squirrel and my whole train of thought is derailed. On my way in I saw an entry on the front page about bed sheet quality and a woman arguing with her boyfriend’s mother about whether thread count really does matter. My god how can that compete against me and my dream? Here you go check out the squirrel. I promise I’ll be here when you get back.

So on to regularly scheduled programming.

Disclaimer one.

• I almost never dream. Or more accurately if I do dream I do not remember. The only time I ever dream and remember my dreams is if I get up at my normal time and then go back to bed and fall sound asleep and then I will dream - weirdly and vividly. I did that this morning.

Disclaimer two.

• I almost never read about other people’s dreams. I find them boring and inane. I think people generally have enough real life to write about without hanging their dreams out to dry. I want this paragraph to be about the same length as the one above it so I will have to add a sentence about nothing. There, I did it.

Hence the dream.

It was vivid and had several parts and seems to have occurred in the past. It felt like that time in my life when I had a husband and either teenage or young adult kids. A good section of it took place at my old old workplace. Would have been in the early 1990s I think. I had an office job in a factory in my small town. The office (admin as a friend likes to call it) staff was close and competitive. There were cliques and jockeying for position and odd person left out which of course I always felt was me. I had been promoted off the floor for a new and very nebulous job which meant people were jealous and suspicious and I was insecure and didn’t have the best of people skills.

The dream as I relate it has two parts - one is carpet and one is a memo. Which would you like first?

Early vote is for carpet. Besides I remember it best. A woman was on her hands and knees on newly installed white shag carpet. Not pure white, kind of a beige, and not long shag, kind of a short shag, a little poodle-y in fact. The woman was laying rugs over the top of the white carpet to protect it and the rugs were the same kind of material but pink. Ok that is the carpet part.

This is the memo part. I had written a rather short though I would hope was snappy memo congratulating us all on a new ‘improvement’ - my job was all about ‘improvement’, so you can see why I was hated. The improvement had been an informal innovation in which a popular and well thought of (those terms mean the same thing, almost) person whose job put her in contact with production people would offer them unsolicited advice. If she had a spare moment she would ‘informally’ check their work, and if she found a glaring error, she would discretely inform them of it and they would make efforts to fix it. Sounds nice and simple, right? It wasn’t really her job to do that, but since she was pleasant and well liked and had good judgement, it was a good thing.

So somehow I wanted to take credit, to document, to suggest it was a good things and I wrote about it. I might have gotten by with it except to prove my own worth I added at the bottom of the memo, that the only thing that might improve this manna from heaven was if the person were trained a little better in quality.

I think you can see where this is going.

I showed the memo to the plant manager. His comment was, “Training in quality”? I said what we had was good but maybe it could be better.

Meanwhile I could see that the backup copy I must have left at the copy machine was being passed around at the informal foremen’s break in the now pink rugged over white carpeted break room. And I could see if getting to the person who I was suggesting needed ‘training in quality’.

That was about when I woke up.

God I’m glad I’m building wiring harnesses instead of ‘improving quality’.

Last updated September 26, 2015