Christmas isn't complete without a wild shoot-out
I thought I was going to a party of some sort.
Instead, I found myself holding a rifle and firing at our enemies, either zombies or 1940's era Germans. Or perhaps both.
For some reason, I would come to believe that participating in this wild firefight was part of my job. And since anything you do as a professional that counts as your ‘job’ is charged to a client code so we can bill our ‘chargeable hours’, I thought to myself, “great, just great.”
“I’m supposed to be on vacation, and yet here I am, crouched on a shipping container with a long gun, defending what may or may not be a Christmas party from some malevolent forces of evil.”
Once the situation calmed down, I said that was enough for me – time to go home and rest. After all, I’m on vacation.
But it’s silly to work so hard for a few hours and not have it count. Was I going to have to go online and amend my time sheet to reflect my time spent in the trenches?
The answer was apparently yes.
Grumbling that I had spoiled by perfect plan to avoid doing any actual productive ‘work’ during my vacation, I trundled home.
A little while later I realize what had happened – once again I had stayed up really late. Rather than playing computer games, I read an awesome book I got from Christmas from a good friend - the
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.You’ll note that I wasn’t sure if I was really fighting Zombies – perhaps they were Germans from World War Two. Well that was, I surmise, my subconscious adding an element of ‘realism’ to the completely insane dream: since zombies are imaginary the opposition
Still, the fact that I stayed up until dawn reading a book and then experienced this little story in my sleep can hardly be a coincidence. Or the fact that yesterday, while I was doing some post-Christmas shopping downtown, I took advantage of my whereabouts to wander into my actual office to pick up a few personal belongings I forgot to take with me.
Or perhaps it was also caused by the friend I met yesterday who actually
had to go back to his office to reset a faulty server - even though he was also on vacation?
Combine that brief exposure to various work environments with an all-nighter reading a zombie book and this doesn’t seem very unusual at all.
The only thing that freaked me out, really, was the intrusion of ‘chargeability’ into the narrative. What am I, some kind of
crazy lawyer who cares about nothing but 'hours'? Ew - perish the thought.