In this case I was charged with putting on a lunch-time meeting at work, essentially a lunch-time entertainment occupying an hour. Attendance entirely voluntary, but one usually reckoned on getting twenty or thirty turning up. Unfortunately for present purposes, the dream seems to have taken place in a number of episodes, with the content of one episode only being rather vaguely available to the next.
So I seem to start off with some content about pianos. Visiting various places - perhaps churches - containing old pianos, some in good working order, some not so good - perhaps driven by the recent visit to Hatchlands (see 2nd July), perhaps by a piano we came across yesterday, an old upright, with no maker's name visible but in a nice wooden case and with two odd metal fittings, one left and one right, maybe for holding candles. I then move onto a lunch-time concert, perhaps a rehearsal for a proper concert in some evening following, a concert for which three performers, all more or less beginners, have been lined up to do their bit, one after the other. At which point the anxiety kicks in, with my worrying that none of these performers are really up to it and the people turning up are going to be a bit cross at being brought along to something which was not what it was advertised to be.
The three performers - now vaguely wind players rather than keyboard players, perhaps reflecting my adolescent efforts on a clarinet - and their performances now morph into the last item, now much shorter, of a meeting with four items on the agenda. The first item is the new security passes which are in the course of being issued; what we are trying to achieve with them and how well we have succeeded. The second item is something to do with some database or other, now lost. The third item is now lost altogether.
The time for the meeting is now rushing up and we are nowhere near ready. But I decide to have a rehearsal for the meeting. A rehearsal which attracts maybe twenty quite senior people and who are slightly surprised when I cut the proceedings short in order to make more time for preparation for the meeting proper. Most of them exit right, sliding away on a punt on a river flowing through the auditorium. I associate now to the physics lecture theatre in my secondary school.
I try to have a meeting to finalise preparations for the meeting proper, now only a few hours away. The chap slated for the security talk doesn't turn up. Can I spoof it? Then I can't remember what the database talk was supposed to be about. I associate now to a (real) chap who did something about the database inside a digital mapping system at a meeting like this. I think of a couple of (also real) people who are quite good at filling up 15 minute slots with something or other but decide that it is not fair on them to ask them to fill in at such short notice.
Things are all looking a bit grim and I wake up.
PS: with thanks to Google and to Carl Frankenstein for the illustration.
No comments:
Post a Comment