From streetlight whisperer to Outlook seer…

I once worked at a bank as a temp where  I would answer calls from people with bad credit that would call after receiving those mail offers with the fake plastic credit card in them telling them that they were so awesome that they had been pre-selected to receive a credit card.  You can imagine their rage when punk-ass-me,  would answer and say “after close review of your credit score we are unable to offer you a credit card at this time.”  They would scream and yell and say “but you guys said I was Pre-approved” and I would scoff and think “don’t you assholes read the fine print” as I politely told them that pre-approval meant ABSOLUTELY NOTHING that we actually didn’t even bother to pull their horrendous credit score before sending out those offers, but because they were stupid enough to respond we did and we would rather offer credit to their 7 year old child than to them!

I remember those days clearly.  For the first few weeks I would close my eyes to go to sleep and my script would play in my head over and over “after close review of your credit score we are unable to offer you a credit card”  the same script that me and thirty others would repeat for 8 hours daily!  The script would haunt my dreams.   I would eventually fall asleep only to wake up  to a curious toddler hitting me over the head with a Blues Clues doll telling me it was time to wake up and do it all over again.

It’s been two weeks since I started my new job and so far it’s a similar story.  (Minus the script and the toddler with the Blues Clues toy.)   For the last two weeks when I close my eyes I see an Outlook calendar filled with appointments and panic over deadlines and meetings and matching tights.  The other night I woke up because I dreamed that I sent my boss to a meeting with a print out of a personal email of mine instead of a fancy presentation I had whipped up for her.  I woke up sweating and in a panic and was relieved that I was home in my bed and not in front of her and the accidental email that probably referenced the word “balls”  a few times.  Every night,  like clockwork,  this Outlook calendar pops in my head and I am hoping that it will wear off like the script eventually did at the bank.

Last Friday I went to bed thinking that I would close my eyes and immediately  see an Outlook calendar where I would brainstorm ways of moving shit around to where I wasn’t going crazy and my boss wasn’t either, but instead I had a terrible dream.  In my dream we lived in a crappy old apartment with 70’s shag carpet and old smoky drapes.  This apartment was similar to one I lived in at the time that I worked at the bank and repeated the same phrase over and over for a living.  In my dream I was begging Michael to let me go back to our house and he was telling me that as much as he would like to it was too late.  That we had signed our house away and that this 70’s motel was now our home.  The counters were sticky and there were roaches.  I remember feeling so crowded and so sad that I was in this tiny place after living in such a beautiful house just weeks prior.

When I woke up and realized it was a dream  Saturday morning I was so incredibly grateful.  I wanted to run outside and kiss the siding of my house like the passenger of a plane who desperately kisses land after surviving a terrible crash.  I felt lucky that I could walk down my beautiful stairs and slide down my bamboo floors instead of shag carpet.  Lucky that my Outlook calendar night terrors are there to remind me that I have a job.  A job where I don’t have to repeat the same script over and over until I go insane.  A job that allows me to live in a house and not an apartment with 70’s shag carpet!

I know it was just a stupid dream but it really made me think of how lucky I am in so many ways.  Life is amazingly overwhelming sometimes and it’s easy to take the wonderful things that it offers for granted.