Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I dreamt I started working for the U.S. Air Force, in a huge, modern, pretty, brightly-lit office building. The building had much more open space than any government office building I've been in, with wide, gleaming hallways and unallocated rooms and multiple large, comfortable break and meeting areas. Project teams had suites of offices with spacious, tidy common areas -- plenty of space to walk through while talking to cow-orkers without being in anyone else's way. More like a movie or television portrayal of an Important Government Agency than any government where-people-work space I've worked in or visited. (I'm not talking about lobbies and auditoreums, or even the places where people waiting to conduct business with the agency queue up; I mean the places where the paper-pushers and electron-pushers sit and work.) Now that I'm awake and thinking about it, I've seen some wide, uncluttered spaces at Goddard (NASA), but I think it was in a block of meeting rooms, not offices. (Hmm ... and a couple of spots within the Department of Labor that looked as though they'd been more busy in the past then had a bunch of people moved elsewhere or RIF'd.) In the dream, the ceilings were higher and sunlight somehow got in. And I have seen wider hallways in the Pentagon, but every time I went through a door from one of those Pentagon hallways you could drive a car through comfortably and went into an office or office-cluster ot cubicle-farm I found the same cluttered, pinched-for-space environment that I eventually came to think of as "how government office spaces look". In the dream the feeling of openness and "enough room" carried over into the areas with furniture, not just the halls and lobby.

(Of course, my knowledge of government office spaces, even limiting it to my own governments (federal/state/local), is not exhaustive. I've been in enough to have seen a pattern among the ones I've worked in, been to meetings in, visited, made deliveries to, etc.. But I've never been to the parts of the Pentagon beyond the armed guards standing in the hall in front of the door that says "Joint Chiefs" on it, and I haven't spent time in the offices of cabinet-level officials, and there are entire agencies I haven't visited.)

The amount of space between offices was more like Bell Atlantic (before they became Verizon) than the government spaces I've been in, but it was even more space than that. Think of a television show set in a Really Expensive Law Firm for the geometry (lots of room to arrange the actors in, not much background clutter to distract the viewer's eye). The colour scheme was gleaming white and chrome rather than "institutional beige" or grey -- and it was new-looking white, not how white walls and furniture would look after a couple years in the real world. The overall effect was "bright-future science-fiction movie". And the place was truly labyrinthine -- more so than the Pentagon (which is confusing, yes, but as much simply for its scale as for the occasional "what were they thinking?" quirks in its layout). Twice as much confusing-ness as the Pentagon in a building no larger than you might find on a large university campus.

Except that when it came to the specific individual room I shared with two other programmer/analysts in the dream, that was more typically government-office sized. Much less cluttered, and reasonably comfortable despite its size, but only just big enough for us to not be constantly bumping our chairs into each other. Three techies in a space smaller than the office I used alone at Bell Atlantic. Go figure. But at least it wasn't as cramped as the Environmental Protection Agency offices I've been in.

The first day of the new job in my dream was spent configuring the Sun workstation they gave me and getting to know my officemates, and learning the rules regarding when the carpet-cleaning and wastbasket-emptying robots should or should not be allowed into the office depending on what we were working on at the time. (But not filling out paperwork or being photographed for an ID badge.) The second day was spent getting lost trying to find my office again, trying to figure out what the balance between programming/analysis/sysadmin tasks was going to be, and eventually deciding that I should try to get some actual work done since I was getting paid.

So I went to find my supervisor, who had said something the first day about some configuration files that needed editing. I found him eating lunch in an empty classroom which really did look more like a university classroom or maybe a high school science lab than it resembled anything else in the dream-building, except that it did have a couple of old, beaten-up-looking Suns off to one side (come to think of it, every computer I saw in the dream was a Sun with a nice bright white screen running X). At the front of the room was a distinctly low-tech, perfectly ordinary slate chalkboard, rather dusty. My supervisor wrote the path/filename of one of the files on the chalkboard, and a snippet of its contents around what needed to be changed. It was a shell script, and I had to ask a couple of syntax questions because it was Bourne shell (or bash) and I'm much more familiar with C-shell (or, of course, tcsh). Once I got the synrax down, the required fix seemed obvious, dead-simple, so I went to make the change.

And here's where I finally get to the one thing that, on waking, seemed to make this dream worth bothering to describe and share: I tried to edit the file right there on the chalkboard by writing vi commands on the board. First just dragging a fingertip through the dust on its surface, then picking up a piece of chalk to do it right. My supervisor questioned this, and I reassured him that it should work, and it nearly did. The only problem with this in the dream was that there was no termcap entry for the chalkboard, so I had to use vi in "open mode" (that is, as though the blackboard were a printing terminal instead of a screen -- open mode is where vi behaves like ex, a text editor that doesn't rely on being able to move the cursor around on the screen), and I'm not good at that, so I eventually gave up and went to the battered (and glitchy) Sun in the corner to finish editing the file.

While I was working at the Sun, someone came in to wash the blackboard and I had to shout at them to wait until I had finished copying what I needed. Oddly, when I said it was okay to continue, they took the blackboard off the wall and set it flat on the floor to scrub it.

And if any of you Emacs-using heretics have had dreams in which your editor worked just fine on a slate blackboard, I don't want to hear about it, okay? I'll go brush up on my 'ex' commands just in case the dream meant something.