Dream Journal: A backhoe in the crypt, and other travel impediments

So it started as a standard travel anxiety dream (although I have no impending trips in the near future). I'm at work; I have a flight somewhere in about four hours; I'm thinking, 'Ok, an hour to tidy things up here, an hour to go home and get my bags and get to the airport, leaving me with a couple hours for security delays and whatnot -- I'm right on schedule.' And, of course, now the standard anxiety dream events kick in with folks at work delaying me, paperwork not being ready, and so forth, but I still make it out to the parking lot well on schedule.

Then as I'm pulling out (and, by the way, my beautiful green Element has firmly ensconced itself in my dream-landscape at the default vehicle)there's a thud and scrape. I look over to my right, and I've slammed into the side of the car next to me. I'm thinking, 'What the heck? I had plenty of space.' Then I look to my left and the ground has opened up revealing the reason for my erratic driving. It seems that at some point, someone had left a backhoe in a pit in the parking lot and just filled in dirt over it, but now the dirt has settled leaving deep holes around the now-revealed backhoe. And it was the seismic shift of this earth-movement that caused my car to ram into the other parked car. I hop out of the car and start taking pictures to use as evidence for the police and insurance company.

But I still need to get out of there and get home so I can get to the airport, only now the parking lot has transmogrified into the interior of a cathedral (and the backhoe is revealed to be sitting in the crypt below the nave) so I have to wait for services to be over before I can extract my car and leave. This is the point where everything goes fuzzy and I think I woke up. Originally there were a bunch of much more specific details about the delaying issues at work before the parking lot/crypt incident, but they slipped away while I was trying to hold onto the main plot thread.

No interpretation on this one: the lack of real-life travel plans to map it to makes it impossible to figure out the symbolic equivalence of a backhoe in a church crypt.

Dear ATT Wireless

I really don't have any need to talk to a human being. I don't need to take up anybody's time. But I would like an easy means of verifying that you are aware that the cell phone service is totally out in my area and that you're working on it. Really -- I understand. These things happen. It's ok. I just want to be certain that you know it is happening. You don't need thousands of people calling in to say, "Did you know your cell phone signal has been completely dead in area X for the last six hours?" But that's what you're going to get if you don't provide easily accessible status updates. You have a website. You could do it if you wanted to.

Geek-off

So one of my co-workers has challenged me to a geek-off. His credentials are good: we've argued Star Trek trivia; he bored the rest of us to tears discussing World of Warcraft strategy with someone from another department; I accept him as a worthy challenger. But I think he's in over his head. He defined the structure of the geek-off contest: every day for a week we are each to bring in some artifact demonstrating our geekhood and they are to be judged against each other by the acclaim of the other co-workers. I won today's round with my "Hittite homework assignment turned in on a clay tablet in cuneiform" versus his "nearly unsolvable maze drawn on a sheet of notebook paper." For tomorrow's entry, I believe I shall submit "personal note of thanks in the preface of a fantasy novel for research services rendered to the author". But I must ponder ideas for the remainder of the challenge. I wouldn't want to lose through complacency.