Batch

09-28-2013 -- Long one, but many of the details are too visual to describe. Starts with me from a great height, preparing to dive into a pool, but the pool keeps shifting and changing. As I get closer and closer, the pool is turning more into a sort of neighborhood being built, and I am looking down at a few streets and houses.

As I get ever closer, I am being sent here to work security, and am wearing an Argenbright heavy jacket, but underneath it I have been told to wear street clothes, and warned this may not be a typical security job. Somehow I am looking at a sort of blue print or map, then looking at the site, itself, and I can see (highlighted with white light) the small sections so far that have been built, or are being built.

I am kind of able to highlight new sections on the map to select them, point them at the right place (kind of like a jigsaw puzzle, the place where they fit in), and have them start to be built there. There are two other people here ... a fairly nice lady who seems to be in charge, and a less friendly one who is also finding new sections on the map to have built. I think she feels we're in competition, which is why she isn't too friendly.

Anyway, at this point we're on the ground, in the dirt, surrounded by bricks and building supplies, earth movers, and big rigs. The woman in charge is pointing us to building various buildings, and doing color selections and the like, and it turns out that, unlike what it first looked like, all these places are not almost the same, but range from packed-tight one room suites to four and five bedroom full houses. She says I should make sure to do a good job on one of the one room suites, because she is going to give it to me while I work here, so I will always be on site.

This just keeps making the other lady more angry, and she tries to work ever better and faster to show me up, somehow printing up the lettering to go on the maps, but they are huge, so we have these 20 to 30 inch tall letters, but they aren't printed on anything, they are just kind of floating there in the air, waiting to be placed on the map. This isn't too bad for the black letters, meant to go on a white background, but there are also reverse letters meant to go on a black background that aren't white, but just letter-shaped holes floating in midair. Very strange.

At this point the construction site is changing, and instead of being a residential street, it is turning into what looks much more like a giant warehouse or manufacturing site, tall walls, a ceiling perhaps 25 or 30 feet overhead, warehouse racks. I have just helped run a phone line from where the lady in charge is to where we are working, and I am now being ordered by another woman (unfriendly) to run another phone line from the main office to the locker room.

So I take the large spool of phone wire that I am handed, and head out looking for the locker room. The problem is, the locker room has not been built yet. There are no signs for it. I just have to wander around looking for areas that look like they might eventually become the locker room, and ask anybody in the area if that might be what they are building.

While looking around for the right place, I stumble into Rosemary, one of my past landlords. She is looking for help on something, and I don't have what she is looking for, but then Shannon (who was another roommate, but one who didn't work, never paid any rent, and just helped out around the place a little) steps up and provides her with whatever it is. She starts making comments about how he is the only one doing anything around the place, and I am absolutely worthless. I blow up at her because just because I can't help with whatever specifically she was looking for, doesn't mean I am not doing important work.

Meanwhile, I finally find where the locker room is supposed to be, and it is in a completely different area than where I dragged the phone line, so I go back to where I left it, and start wrapping it up around my hand and elbow, then start moving it over to the proper place. The problem is, I was handed a 150' phone line, and the distance from the office to the locker room is more like 200' if the phone line is run along the walls. The mean woman is back, and wanting to know why I haven't finished yet, and I explain about the distance, and needing more phone line. She seems upset with me, and tells me to just drop it, and go looking for "something" street or something like that, and to find and plant some pineapple trees or something like that.

So I go looking for this particular street she mentioned, except that it isn't a street, but a department in the store, which is what the whole place is turning into ... a huge department store, probably the biggest in the world. and still with 30 or 40 foot ceilings. Much of it is still just ground being moved around, but then other areas we can see internal walls going up, and in yet other areas there are furnishings or racks of clothes or the like, so there are all stages of construction in different parts of the building.

Meanwhile, the unfriendly woman is more and more quickly turning into Dolores Umbridge, which explains why she is so unpleasant. She is always walking around holding a baseball bat and slapping it in her palm, like she is just looking for a reason to hit people with it, and as she sends me off looking for these pineapple trees, she is telling me not to forget to take a bat of my own along, and indeed there are several packages of numerous redwood bats wrapped in plastic wrap.

So I start looking for the 'street' where I am supposed to handle these pineapple trees, and am having no luck because again, nothing is labeled, and somehow I end up walking around on what might be the roof, about 40 feet in the air, walking along the roof beams and things. Mike Sullins is one of the construction workers below, and he is calling to me, so I step off the beam and plunge toward the ground, yet somehow I slow down just as I am about to hit, and touch down gently. I have no idea how I can do this, but others are doing the same thing.

Mike points me in the right direction, and soon I find myself in one of the more complete areas, where they are setting up furniture displays, and I find two 'packs' of large, prickly seeds (which seem like slightly thinner full-size pineapples, themselves) to grow the pineapple trees wrapped in manilla envelopes. I know that these seeds are supposed to be loaded into a shotgun and shot into the ground, but the nice woman is here, and explains how she is not going to trust many of these crazies with a shot gun, so she never ordered it. Instead I am going to have to take a planter, pull most of the contents partly out, then kind of wriggle the huge seed through the tiny top of the vase-like planter, and somehow hook it in the proper place inside. I am mumbling about how it's all insane, but am not seriously bothered by it.

So now I have the seeds themselves, and I have to continue looking around the various departments to try and find the right one, and find the two planters that do not yet have the first buds of pineapple trees starting to grow out of them, while all the while Umbridge is running around complaining about everybody.