esrosedotblog

DREAM JOBS

It has been many, many years since I had a real job. In an office or a company.

But I still dream about it.

The most usual dream, which I had today, is that I return to my first job out of college. The engineering office of the late great Acme Markets in Philadelphia. I just take over my old job which was, actually, mostly doing nothing.

I was brought in because my boss wanted an MIT guy around. I didn't know that at the time but that is my conclusion.

There were "plans" for my future in the operations wing of the company. Bakeries, canning operations, dairy.

I think that I was a chess piece being played with the other managers.

It is not important.

In the dream, it is as though I have been in exile. Some of the same people are there. The job is still as indistinct as it ever was.

I go up the elevator, down a hall and there is my desk. Untouched. I have been away for awhile. There is some inconsequential paper work. I sit and attend to it.

I am happy to be there but also feel, as I did then, that no one else knows that I am there. Or cares.

I was attached to various senior guys from time to time. I would have an occasional project of my own. I would visit plants. I did inspections of all the plants once a year because no one else wanted to do them. I loved that part. Snooping.

But, it is wearing when you have nothing to do.

I never really got an evaluation.

Towards the end, they sent me to outside training. It was life changing. They sent me to one of the early T-Groups.

I got it. I was never the same again.

I left when I was 26 and went back to Massachusetts where I got a real job in operations. Fulfilling.

After that, I got into management training, made useful partnerships, learned the trade and started my own company.

Why do I keep returning to this first workplace? I think that it is the incompletion of it.

I never got anywhere. It was almost like Kafka. Or what I think Kafka wrote about. Inconsequentialness.

But that is only one part of it.

What I got without, almost, knowing it, was a keen observation of work, of company life, of how people work together, how hierarchy creates suffering. A world of insight. All recorded.

When it came time, all this observation would pour out into aspects of training for people who felt empty or directionless. To give them power.

Not only that, the T-Group experience stayed with me to such an extent that I partnered with a T-Group pioneer to take those ideas further into a more practical realm.

Without realizing it, my first years were seminal. The learning I had laid in my lap was incredible.

But, still. It is unfinished business for me. I go to work, I find my desk and there is still nothing to do.

I have had a charmed life and one of the charms was to get a job at the beginning which was so totally non-engaging that I had to find my own way and make something of it.

I am obviously still doing so.

Labels: dreams, life, work

DREAMWORLD

I often have dreams of something like this. Full screen view recommended.

It looks fake sometimes. Maybe it is. They don't show anyone landing.

Thanks to Todd for this one.

Labels: dreams, life, nature, sports

TRAVEL DREAMS

We went out to friends for dinner last night and so I got to bed late.

9:30 PM.

So, today was sleep catchup.

I had one of those naps that goes on and on.

My usual day nap is about 60 - 90 minutes but this one lasted 3 hours.

I had one of the classic travel dreams that I get.

Not all my dreams are memorable but some are classic and repeat themselves so reliably that I can remember details for at least a day afterwards.

For many years I dreamed about missing class or not doing the lab work for a course or having a final for a course I had never attended. The academic dream.

Then for a long time I would dream training dreams. I am leading a group of managers and I have no idea what the lesson plan is or, perhaps, I am being asked to speak and have no idea who the people are or what is expected. Sometimes I find that I have no clothes on.

Dr.Freud would have an easy time with those dreams.

Now, the memorable dream is about travel. All those years on planes, trains and in automobiles, almost weekly, are coming home to roost while I sleep.

There is always a border crossing. There are papers that are needed to get across. There are various flights that must be connected. There is always a problem getting out my passport. Sometimes I don't know where it is that I am going.

The gate is always hard to find. Sometimes there is a toll bridge and I do not have the cash.

Sometimes I actually get on the plane and the plane does not really fly but goes along the highway. Other times the plane does fly but only a hundred or so feet off the ground. Sometimes lower than the trees.

The interior of the plane is always more like a bus than a plane cabin.

I never have language difficulties.

There are complex schedules.

Today, I had to meet someone in England and then connect to Russia where the same person I talked to in England is going to meet me but I can't get there in time because the person at Heathrow checkin wants to see a travel magazine instead of the passport, tickets and other papers that I have in a very thick envelope sort of on the scale of a FedEx envelope. Maybe it is FedEx.

There are no motels on these trips. I often leap across time and end up meeting the person I am expecting to meet without an intervening trip. A bit like a time warp.

There is no real anxiety. There is frustration over the fact that I do not have the magazine that is required but I ask to see the clerk's supervisor and I am so effective in complaining that he simply lets me pass.

When I wake up I remember all of it. In detail.

The actual fact is that I traveled a million (?) miles and rarely had a problem.

My luggage was delayed once in Dusseldorf and another time, on vacation, in the Virgin Islands.

I always had all my papers.

I was a healthy road warrior who could take the bumps as well as the pleasures.

There was a lot of pleasure in being on the road. I always liked the hotels and the cities and the people.

Of course, those days are over.

Travel now is a vast wasteland of waiting, checking in, arriving late, being pushed around in crowds and so on.

I came in on the DC3 and went out on the jumbo jets. The DC3 was better, as much as it shook us around. It had a long glide path too. If the engines failed they had a long time to put it down.

I think that hotels and food are better now.

But maybe not.

When I first traveled it was mostly from Philadelphia to the Eastern Shore of Maryland and in a car.

There were no chain hotels or restaurants. Everything was local. You looked and asked for direction from locals.

At the end, I stayed in big chain hotels for the most part. I ate in the hotel a lot of the time.

The best regular hotel I stayed at was the Marriott at the World Trade Center. They had the best food too.

You know what happened to that.

Actually, it happened twice. The same building, under a different name, was right over the place the truck bomb blew up. They got my room and the restaurant that time.

I often asked to have the same room in a hotel I returned to. And got it.

The second best hotel was the Holiday Inn Royale in Geneva. Overseas, the Holiday Inn chain is a premium stay and the Royale is the top of the line.

They had terrific breakfasts. I would stay over the last day of the program, get up and go the two miles to the airport and ride back home.

The flight I took back and forth from Geneva to New York City was on the same plane. It went back and forth every day. About a year after I quit going to Geneva it blew up going out of Kennedy. Gas vapors ignited through a wiring flaw. Everyone died.

Is there a trend here? Things blowing up after I am done with them?

No wonder I dream about travel.

I can remember almost every place I ever stayed. Can you imagine? I think that is because when you work on the road you learn the shit fast and absorb it. You do not have time for getting lost. You get it right and keep it.

Obviously, I kept it better than I thought.

I am destined to fucking dream about it for the rest of my life.

Labels: dreams, life, travel

DREAM ON

I usually don't remember my dreams.

They are gone within moments of waking.

But there are some that endure.

There is the travel dream where I am going to Europe but I have no connecting ticket or I am naked or the gate is obscure.

There is also the airplane dream where the plane doesn't actually fly but travels on the ground and then takes off from a regular highway, stays at tree level, and then lands without so much as a bump. I think this is the same as the old flying dream that everyone has. The one without the airplane.

There is the one where I am in Boston and remember that I have a second apartment that I never vacated in Charles River Park. I go there and open the mailbox. Go to the apartment and set up housekeeping.

I think that a part of me still wants to rent.

I still have some MIT dreams. There is an exam and I haven't attended a class or done the reading let alone the homework.

Not too far off the truth actually. I fiddled a lot while rome burned in the classroom.

I have a few recurring sex dreams but I won't bore you with those.

The training dream has several variations.

There is the one where there is no training room. We have to meet outside. Sometimes in the woods.

There is the one where I am naked.

There are some others that are non-specific but have the general taste of failure in them.

Last night was the one where I have no time to even start the program let alone get it finished. It was at my old client McKinsey.

The group was late and then when they arrived they had to rearrange the furniture.

Then I had trouble getting through introductions as I had no charts.

It was a fuck-up compilation. All the things that can go wrong.

The difference now is that I don't seem to mind much. I do the work and do my best and that is that.

Since this particular course only lasted about fifteen minutes before they had to leave it wasn't too painful either.

I always wake up relieved that it was just a dream but, in this case, I had a tinge of regret.

I wish I had a course that lasted only fifteen minutes. Three days was the norm.

Don't get me wrong. These are not nightmares. They are just one hazardous step from some form of reality or worry that I had in all the years I have lived.

The nightmares are few and far between and almost always involve some cataclysm or devouring beast.

I have never had either happen to me.

All lower brain stem stuff I am sure.

I don't know what Freud would make of all this.

Probably not too much.

Sometimes a training room is just a training room.

Labels: dreams