Dreaming

30 January 2018 03:50 pm
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One of those rare days when I remember a dream. Though the weird part was, though it was a dream it was actually a memory. Normally, my dreams are far more abstract than that.

March 2007. Working for the Boss From Hell, day four of one of our interminable death marches. Week four of my new role here. My original job with this employer (no names, no tack-hammer to the ballsack) was building things to detect fraud. This new role involved building things to find people who would become unable to repay their loans in the next 3-6 months. It wasn’t until I had already accepted the job that the scope was made clear. Not only was it design with the possibility of programming years later rather than the programming with occasional design I had been sold on, I had serious ethical problems with what they wanted me to do.

I’m sitting at my desk, about four in the afternoon, having been plugging away since sitting down at roughly nine in the morning (BFH had serious problems with this, but that’s fortunately not a feature of the dream). The place has four different systems from which we can extract data. I’m going through a list of available fields from the COBOL copybooks of each, trying to match the fields to what the vendor of the new system wants. At the same time, I’m trying to define additional sets for when we get the new system and want to extend it — the nice-to-haves along with the requirements.

So I’ve been plugging away at this for seven hours (because lunch is for the weak). BFH asks me to look at something. Because our machines are underpowered garbage, I quit Excel to look at this thing. My fingers reflexively hit the “Don’t save” button.

It feels like the world’s ended.

In real life, it took me three hours to put together everything I’d lost. In the dream, it felt like years. In real life, I had enough context left in my brain to speed up. In the dream, I’d lost all of what I’d learned and more. Rewinding that work hurt so much, explicitly because it’s one of the few times in that job that I got fucked over by something that was my fault.