Waiting rooms
Dec. 10th, 2021 12:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
boccaderlupoI dreamed we had to get some kind of device for my daughter's school that would verify her attendance and enable her to participate in sports. It was like some kind of surveillance monitoring, which I was not too pleased with, but my daughter wanted to play her sport, so we were compelled to do it. The device looked like a weird piece of white plastic with no discernible interface, and you had to get it from an obscure department in our local school.
The school interior consisted of multiple floors, many of them cloaked in shadows, that seemed like a combination bowling alley and basketball court. To get the device you had to wait on these unbearably long lines, sitting in various uncomfortable chairs set at adequate "social distance" for untold hours. The first time we tried it, we waited 18 hours only to have the school close for the night and had to come back the following day, to start the process all over again. The kicker was that, as the line moved and you advanced on to the next room, you'd find that it was filled with another assortment of chairs; the line was even longer than we had previously imagined. It was some Kafkaesque farce, and I was sick of it.
I got up from my chair and ran up to the service desk, several floors above where we were waiting. "What is this, the U.S.S.R.?"
The guy behind the counter, a stout man with a full beard, about my age, looked hurt. "I was born in the U.S.S.R.," he said in a heavy Russian accent. He looked lost. I felt bad.
Then all of a sudden, as if flipping a switch, he allowed everyone just to walk up to the counter. No chairs, no waiting. I guess maybe the guy felt bad for making people wait, and decided to change everything up.
Now it was a mad scrum, like a retail store around the holidays. I tried to navigate through the chaos and get the device, but there were scores of people mobbing the counter. The guy seemed nonplused, however, and people seemed to be getting the devices with relative ease, although it was quite a scene. I still felt a little bad for taunting the guy, but how was I to know he was from there? My daughter and I got the awful device and left.
*
I dreamed I was being deployed on some weird military mission. We were in what seemed to be an inverted trapezoidal structure, a giant brown brick with treads, moving slowly through the jungle. We were on our way to some life-or-death mission, and the soldiers inside the brick base were tense. I was to share a room with some hotshot lunkhead from the Navy or something. The guy looked at me as I arranged my bunk and sneered. "How do you sleep?"
"Soundly," I told him. My head hit the pillow and that was that.
The school interior consisted of multiple floors, many of them cloaked in shadows, that seemed like a combination bowling alley and basketball court. To get the device you had to wait on these unbearably long lines, sitting in various uncomfortable chairs set at adequate "social distance" for untold hours. The first time we tried it, we waited 18 hours only to have the school close for the night and had to come back the following day, to start the process all over again. The kicker was that, as the line moved and you advanced on to the next room, you'd find that it was filled with another assortment of chairs; the line was even longer than we had previously imagined. It was some Kafkaesque farce, and I was sick of it.
I got up from my chair and ran up to the service desk, several floors above where we were waiting. "What is this, the U.S.S.R.?"
The guy behind the counter, a stout man with a full beard, about my age, looked hurt. "I was born in the U.S.S.R.," he said in a heavy Russian accent. He looked lost. I felt bad.
Then all of a sudden, as if flipping a switch, he allowed everyone just to walk up to the counter. No chairs, no waiting. I guess maybe the guy felt bad for making people wait, and decided to change everything up.
Now it was a mad scrum, like a retail store around the holidays. I tried to navigate through the chaos and get the device, but there were scores of people mobbing the counter. The guy seemed nonplused, however, and people seemed to be getting the devices with relative ease, although it was quite a scene. I still felt a little bad for taunting the guy, but how was I to know he was from there? My daughter and I got the awful device and left.
*
I dreamed I was being deployed on some weird military mission. We were in what seemed to be an inverted trapezoidal structure, a giant brown brick with treads, moving slowly through the jungle. We were on our way to some life-or-death mission, and the soldiers inside the brick base were tense. I was to share a room with some hotshot lunkhead from the Navy or something. The guy looked at me as I arranged my bunk and sneered. "How do you sleep?"
"Soundly," I told him. My head hit the pillow and that was that.
