Of Offices and the Veldt

All dreams begin in a sort of psychic confinement, as if context is lost and you’re reborn of circumstances you cannot explain.

Last night as I slept I was back at my first full-time office job, a sweatshop where I worked for almost three years because the early 80s unemployment rate flirted with ten percent, so the bosses could have their way with us. And fool that I was, I’d moved two thousand miles from my CLA placement office with my newly printed BA in hand, knowing only the friends with whom I’d moved.

I worked as a proofreader and preparing the tax packages for a large accounting firm. It meant coordinating, copying, and collating the returns, proofing correspondence, making sure the computations were checked, etc. That was the rational job, in and of itself.

But in the dream everything had been updated; there were locked doors and pass cards and inside the doors it was like the frenzied offices of the movie Brazil. I didn’t know where my desk was, and my old boss, Stanley, was in his office having an argument. I knew he was in there because, looking over the drawers outside his newly dreamt office, through the half-closed levelors of his shoulder-high office window, I could see the backs of two heads, presumably facing him, and I could hear the loud, emotive voices.

It’s a very odd thing, taking animals such as ourselves from the veldt and whatever other habitats our multi-layered minds and hormone-driven limbic systems were concocted on, and putting them in cubicles and offices. Thousands of years of evolution spent developing a system to hoot, holler, reprove, sweet talk, connive, cry, nurture and yell at each other and then we are asked to shut it all down, please, pretend the rational mind exists dis-connected from the emotive system that drove it this far.

(One of my first jobs in SF was through a temp agency working in a dusty old phone company warehouse parsing out phone records for the new private long-distance companies, working with a communist from New York who explained to me that the reason so many people had office affairs (back then, at least) was because of the repressive office environment. And you know, being a fan of Billy Wilder, Jack Lemmon, and the movie The Apartment as I am, it made sense to me.)

Dreaming, I was looking for where I was to work, and seeing an odd mix of former coworkers all at new desks, with state of the art equipment, like an architecture firm gone mad with high tech toys: bright cone-shaped lamps and easels and big-screen monitors and computers and pens on metal arms with colored lights, like the wet dream of a German interior designer gone mad with techno industrial post-modernity.

And the receptionist was on the loudspeaker, calling out my name, urgently.

Somehow, I knew that all of this wasn’t urgent for me. While I had no explanation for why I was there, I knew this couldn’t possibly last — yet I didn’t take it to that next step, either: It’s all just a dream. It turned out the Department of Motor Vehicles had dropped off a package for me, they were conducting a hearing that very afternoon and were about to suspend my driver’s license. I had no idea why, but I took the news calmly — I thought of the transit system and knew I could get there in time.

I tend to problem-solve in my dreams, and I knew this trouble was a nuisance but would be okay. And then I had a sense of the pity of it. I hadn’t seen my old boss for all these years. I still quoted him fairly often, outwardly and inside my head. He was from rural Ohio, and when he was under pressure (most of the time, especially busy season) he used to like to grumble, “It’s days like this that make a chicken farm in southern Ohio sound aaawwful good.”

The lead proofreader used to gossip about him, criticizing most of his decisions. The word processors would relay what she said and Stanley would mutter, “well, if the old girl is tying into me she’s laying off someone else.” That still makes me smile.

I learned all manner of odd office rituals there. Before we hit our busy season he would grow aloof to the point of hostility. The first time it happened it caught me off-guard, but I came to understand it was his way of indicating ‘don’t stick around if you’re not going to last the whole busy season. It’s been nice and easy this summer, and you’ve enjoyed the relatively slower pace. But if you aren’t going to last, move on now.’

The nuisance of it was that sometimes I could see trouble brewing but if I took it to him directly he’d be snappish and, as likely as not, counter what I wanted. So I learned to use the office grapevine. I took the news I had and distilled the situation down to a quarter or less, especially leaving out as much negativity as I could, and went out and told the lead word processor. And then I waited. In a little while she would get up from her desk, and saunter in to the boss’s office, and close the door. I knew she would inflate it in as negative a way as possible — she was definitely a practitioner of the cynic’s view, that the worst elements of human nature were only thinly veiled under the surface — and soon thereafter my boss would bustle out of his office and come and ask me what was going on with the very report I was concerned about.

Somehow, that he was coming to ask me gave me a slight hold on the steering wheel. I could answer with my concerns, and likely as not he would resolve things favorably for me.

I knew it was odd, it was dysfunctional, but it also worked, and in various forms I have seen that very dance performed time and time again ever since, though rarely again has the choreography stepped off so neatly as it was then, over twenty years ago.

In my dream, I was a litle bit sad that I wouldn’t see Stanley again. That I wouldn’t get a chance to talk to all the various co-workers I dreamt (from at least four different jobs, that I can re-call) who were all at their desks, frowning at and scribbling on paper and tapping at their keyboards. But it couldn’t be helped. I knew, viscerally, that this job was not for me any more. By whatever bizarre circumstances had me back here, it would not last, and besides, I had to go deal with the Department of Motor Vehicles.

And then I woke up and realized what a normal dream I’d had — the kind we all have, yes? Where such odd, unlikely things happen.