Nazrax

June 17, 2013

Gas Station Trouble
I'm at a Citgo, getting gas. The pump says to insert a credit card to start the transaction. I stick in my Amex, and the pump promptly thanks me for paying $58.1x. A pump attendant is walking nearby, so I ask him for help, saying that something went wrong, that I ended up paying for someone else's gas and need a refund.

He takes me to the manager, a rather hard woman who has no sympathy for me at all. I argue with her that it's not my fault, that the pump said what it always said, except that this time instead of letting me pump gas, it paid for the last person who used the pump. After much assertiveness on my part, she finally agrees to look into it.

The pump receipt has the previous customer's full information, so the manager calls the customer. She takes my Amex and starts asking the lady if she's ever heard of a card starting with xxxxxx (the first six digits of my dream card) or of a card with a cssv of xxxx (whatever it was in the dream). The customer hasn't heard of such a card.

While she's on the phone, I realize that all I need to do is call Amex and dispute the charge; but I realize the dispute will work better if the manager is on my side, so I let her continue with her call.

When I woke up after that one, I was feeling rather stressed.


My Hand's Outline
I'm in my office. I've decided to draw an outline of my hand so that, if I ever think my hand has changed size, I can check it against the outline and tell for sure. I grab a sheet of paper that's already been printed on and spread out my hand on it. Oddly, my finger tips are off the edge. I turn the paper and try again, with the same result. So, I turn the paper back to vertical and put my hand on it with the fingers together, and this time they fit.

I start tracing on the right side of my hand. I'm using a rather fat pencil, so the line starts too far out from my hand. I need to be careful to keep the line to the actual outline of my hand. I make it up past my middle finger and start to come down the other side.

Except now, I'm not tracing my physical hand, I'm tracing a shadow of my hand. There's a lot of stuff already printed in this part of the paper, and I'm having trouble seeing my hand's shadow. With difficulty, I manage to trace it down further.

Eventually, I get to a point that I just can't make it out at all. There seems to be a wonderfully detailed city printed on the paper, and the city is casting its own shadow further down on the paper, hiding my hand's shadow.

I think about taking the city off, but there's some reason I can't.


Conversations at Work
I'm at work, in the parking deck. I get onto the elevator along with a couple of friends, hit the button for my floor, then hit what I think is the door close button. It actually turns out to be the alarm button, but for some reason, the alarm doesn't actually go off. I'm thankful it didn't go off, since that would have been fairly embarassing.

The elevator starts to move. This is an old-fashioned cargo elevator with no doors. If I reached out through the opening, I'd get my arm snapped off by a passing floor. I'm amazed they're still allowed to operate such things.

The elevator stops. We get out, go along a walkway into the building, then start climbing stairs. I would have taken the elevator in the building, but my friends are using the stairs, so I do too. I'm worried, though, because we're going to the 40th floor.

Amazingly, after just a couple of flights of steps, we're there. I ask them what happened. They explain that in building A, each floor is actually two floors (say, 15A and 15B), so to get to floor 40 you'd actually have to climb past 80 floors; but that building B isn't like that, and we're in building B, so it's OK.

Now I'm with only one of my friends, Peter. We're walking down a hallway. He's talking about most of us having to follow certain rules, but people who are important enough can get exemptions (as long as they clear them with the police across the street). We're going to one such person now - some kind of scientist. Her office doesn't have a door - it's just a big room off the hallway. Peter talks with her for a while; I just stand there, a few feet further away, watching. Eventually she notices me and Peter introduces me. I happen to have my mouth full so I mumble a hello.

Something comes up about one of my team members wanting me to run Snort on one of our lab segments, and she asks me my opinion of Snort vs Enterprise Scanner. I tell her Snort is much better, which surprises her. Out the window, I notice it's raining. I can't remember if the wind breaker I'm wearing has a built-in hood, so I reach up and check. It does.

Eventually, we leave her and walk further down the hallway. Peter asks me about public schools for my daughter. When I tell him we don't use them, he tries to prove his point by asking if I'm registered for the draft. My wife shows up and says that I'm not, that I might register one day. I reply that it's mandatory to be registered, so I've been registered ever since I was required to me. She gets really unhappy and wants to know when this happened and why she didn't know about it. That disagreement goes on for a couple of minutes, then we're looking at a flier for the draft. It's actually a story about a guy who got drafted into some war, quickly gained ranks, and left the military a few decades later as one of its most highly ranking people, and This Could Happen To You Too.