Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Just woke up feeling tired and drained from a really intense dreamm.

My living situation at the start of the dream was confusing/fuzzy, but it wasn't this house and I wasn't living alone. Late at night, I'm handed a letter. It's a request for an interview, urgent, for C/C++ under Unix. I arrange for [person who is a curious cross between keith_m043 and justgus] to pick me up in an RV and drive me into the heart of Washington, DC. Then I go put on a shiny, blood-red dress shirt and forget to pick out a tie. The cell phone I grab is the ancient black Ericsson I used when I had an AT&T cell plan.

My ride arrives, and there's another passenger along for the hell of it, who very faintly resembles a cross between maugorn and Tommy Chong -- this person is some combination of stoned/drunk/ditzy/stupid (in which states I have never seen maugorn in real life, BTW) and mostly just sort of exists in the background occasionally interjecting a comment. We head off, and I give directions. We have to stop for gas, and we talk about how I'm getting to Pennsic and whether I can tow the trailer we built from scratch the year before (didn't happen in real life) with my car. It is, by the way, the day before I plan to leave for Pennsic. Somewhere along the way I'm told that a shiny, blood-red shirt and no tie or jacket, despite being very much not the Proper Interview Uniform, projects a major "relaxed, confident, and here to rescue you" vibe in this case.

Based on waking realizations about some of what I saw out the windshield of the RV in the dream, a) the site may have been in Arlington / Crystal City instead of DC, b) the dream may have borrowed a small chunk of Philadelphia and blended it with DC (making the NY Ave/3rd St/I-395 tangle even more interesting, but all above-ground and almost kindasorta pretty), and c) we were clearly approaching DC from the East, not the North.

I call one of the phone numbers in the letter and it turns out to be a headhunter, who tells me her client is busy but hasn't gone home yet, so arriving around midnight won't be a problem. It becomes clear that this is one of those "oh my God we've screwed this up and don't have any time left so we're calling in superhero contractors we should have hired a year ago to pull our butts out of the flames at the last minute" deals, like when I was working for KLGAI (yes, in real life), and it's going to be four to six months of having to pull miracles out of my ass every three days ... and that therefore I may need to arrange to telecommute from War instead of just saying I can't start until two weeks later. We wind up in a waiting room, where it finally dawns on me just how rusty my skills have gotten. I'm told that the person who'll interview me will be done with her phone call in a few more minutes and will see me then. The Keith/Mike character grasps my shoulder and says something ritually reassuring, and I start trying to figure out what it'll cost to get a laptop in a hurry and pay for net access via Mystic Mail (which supplies a site-wide WiFi network so I can work from my camp, in the dream -- as opposed to having to go plug in at their booth in the merchant area in real life), and how much extra I should ask for to cover those expenses ... And how much of Pennsic I'll actually get to see while I'm there.

I woke up (with a killer headache) before being called in to the interview from the waiting room. In the dream it was right around midnight. (When I opened my eyes, it was 9:30, not that that matters.).