Let's Call This

Do you know that feeling -- the one where you wake from an anxiety crammed dream and, totally knowing it was just a chimera, you keep on attempting to work out whatever quandary existed. This issue MUST be sorted! You continue jumping and snatching at the possibility of a happy ending.

Yup, that was me this morning. In my dream, I was back at the company where I’d worked for a thousand and one half years. I was the Training Director (best gig EVAH!) -- part of the rapidly shrinking Human Resources department.

Lily was my boss and called a meeting to discuss my language and the real and immediate need to clean it up -- particularly as we were approaching the winter holiday season (did I mention this was a dream?). This was apparently a conversation we had semi-regularly. Fuck!

She also needed to tell me of the upcoming cutbacks and layoffs in HR. In fact, the department would soon be eliminated. Double plus fuck!

I was panicked but not surprised, the company was doing badly and, as a whole, we were being downsized to the dimensions of a Chihuahua poop.

Almost immediately, I began doing the big tap dancing sell, making the case for me to remain as a one person HR. Though deaf, I could still interview, deal with all benefits issues, conflicts and any other little thing that could come across the HR threshold. Most biz could be conducted via email and IM, if not in person. Training would def still be necessary even if, now, just a one on one affair PLUS, in this sleeping vision, I was part time. Win/win/love, eh?

The offices, in this Fata Morgana,  were located in Central Square Cambridge. I made my way to the subway stop, down snowy, icy, messy Mass. Ave. and then home. Home was a wonderful long thin, high ceiling-ed place -- it looked a lot like the digs of a posh family my folks knew back in our rural New Jersey days only mine was, true to real life, WAY cluttered with newspapers and books. It was awesome.

I invited Lily over in order to further convince her of the beauty of my proposal -- of the wonders of Donna, The Amazing HR Duties Juggler.

She arrived just as I was neurotically wolfing some odd, orange-ish microwave popcorn (or ‘pupcawn’ as we pronounce here)-- worrying and mega fretting about what I’d do to make the rent cheddar if this sales job of mine fell flat. Lily listened carefully and sincerely as though what I had to say could really sway the sitch.

And then I woke up and kept on, in my wildly spinning brain, with the arguments and evidences of why The Powers That Be ought to keep me on.

Somewhere, not so long after waking, I realized this was all a dream -- that it’s summer not frozen, messy winter, I haven’t worked at that company for three years or more now, the mortgage is taken care of and, for now, all I need to do is feed our herd of cat, trike, paint and enjoy life.

Christ, what a relief!

Thelonius Monk -- Let's Call This