(no subject)
Just awoke from a long winters nap, about a seven hour nap! I got home around four thirty, long day at work, last day of a week on call. Being on call is a mixd bag. Sometimes it's not much different from a nomarl week, other than having to go in on the weekend, other times you can't seem to get away from the place.This one wasin't bad, but just being tethered to your job is tireing. You have to be constantly ready because the phone can ring at any time for any reason. The powerplants I run have systems that call automatically so when something goes wrong my phone rings, Kinda dangerous cause nobody else knows, but the alternative would be expensive, monitoring the places in shifts from a control room, and of course I'd have some bean counting moron tracking my response time, I'm sure it's coming to that. Iv'e been called out for minor problems, sometimes total bullshit recurring problems that should have been fixed years ago but never get adressed, and major ones, everything from flooding rivers to flooded buildings to explosions, electrical fires, and massive huge machinery that weighs twenty tons or so spinning out of control and destroying itself. Usually at night when the power is out. One thing that never fails is if you forget your flashlight the one you find at the sight is always dead. So much for the Hydropower rant. I Had a pretty cool dream during the nap, Actually the first notable one since I wrote Arabian nightmare two years ago, this one was kind of creepy, I was in an alternate version of the small town I grew up in. Kind of like David Lynch restyled it to resemble HP Lovecrafts Arkham. It was July Fourth and everyone seemd to be somewhere else, off partying in campgrounds and summer cottages and the few people left in town were either working or too broke to go anywhere. I was one of the working stiffs, on call even in my dream, stuck in the village waiting for something to go wrong somewhere, and wandering the streets in the mean time. It was as if thirty years of home improvments had been stripped away, the houses had peeling paint, cars were up on blocks in yards, many places looked abandoned. Really wierd. I ran into someone I knew and helped tow an old truck back to his house so it could be sold for scrap, that seemed to be a main source of income in my nightmare village. The house was crooked, dusty with old french pane windows ready to fall out of their casings. warped floor boards sixteen inches wide cut from old first growth trees, plank walls coverd with layer upon layer of ancient peeling wallpaper, cardboard and layers of old carpet for insulation. The whole dream had a strangeness to it, and yet it's not far from reality. I know people who live in places a lot like the old house, and people who scrap old cars for quick cash when they can, and do whatever else they have to to get by. I spent a July fourth weekend on call like that once, everyone else was away, I guess thats where most of this came from. But the odd part of whole dream was the feeling of a town quietly waiting, hanging on and waiting for prosperity to return, or for a revolution to start. Hopefully things don't come to that in reality. But you wonder, as jobs are shipped overseas to countrys with no labor laws, corporations are allowed to buy legislation and politicians in our country, and working people are expected to starve so a few people can get richer and a little more powerful, what happens when they finally wake up? When the unemployment quits being extended and the rent subsidys run out, what then?