Today, office limbo became more limbo-ier, or more official, one. For about a year now, the office has been seeping and sliding out the doors and across campus to the more central and larger building, higher aloft in the middle of everything.
Now, this would be an exciting move if it were done quickly. Entirely an upgrade. Better location, better equipment, bigger space, and of course, more authority to tell pesky students and other clients to take a hike because they're not using our resources appropriately. Har har.
Well, the part of all that greatness that turns the whole deal sour is the quickly part. None of it was done quickly, and in fact it is still going on. For the intervening time, I've had to tell people looking for the Mason Media Lab (the guys who are going to be moving in here once we move out, and who have temporarily moved in to the other half of the office anyway) to simply continue around the wall to where the MML actually is. Everyone seems baffled by this, meaning I'm sure it was a worse idea than whoever thought it up thought. I'm sure someone looked at how much room we had and said "yeah, this can fit the MML for a little bit and then we'll move you guys in and be done." I wonder how far up the actual concern for clients goes, and my guess is not far. No one was thinking of our clients or the clients of the MML when making all these musical labs decisions.
And as musical labs go, ours was humming with activity then that we had squeezed them all into a space half the size. People got more chummy and had opportunities to be polite to each other about forming lines for our equipment. It felt like office limbo but things stabalized after awhile and I got to know the MML kids and it felt more like one big lab with two uses rather than like two labs.
I suppose the laughable crampedness of it all helped that feeling along, too.

But if it felt like limbo before, then I have no word for what it is now. Of the six terminals that we used to have operating, two remain operational. One is dismantled on a desk, and the rest are "surplussed." Okay there's also the mac but that's no longer for faculty use. Hrm. Our scanner and printer are still here and working. Then you have the weirdness.

In the new lab, with the new carpet and the new desk, there's a cluster of other classrooms and offices that have only tangential relationship to our own, and while we're the ostensible reason all this administration is picking up and moving, they all get moved in before we do, I guess simply because they are further back physically and would have to go through us to get stuff moved. Fine. Then there's this fanatical obsession that the campus moving guys have with blocking off the windows so as to ward off thieves, and the similarly fanatical but opposite obsession that the administration has with keeping the lab visible to show everyone how excellent the new lab will be. They compromise by having mobile piles of crap stacked in random places that partially block different patches of windows every day. The movers move these piles in place of setting up actual equipment to beautify the lab. Hrm. Then there's the large monitor that you can see from across the entire mall that's supposed to broadcast lab propoganda all the time. Sometimes its on, sometimes its obscured, mostly it is off. Also I come in this morning and there are signs saying that my lab has moved and is closed in the building I'm supposed to be going to. So many blatant lies dancing around can stand for only so long before someone collects them all and puts them in a blog entry to complain about them.
Erm, that is to say, someone other than me. Er, moving on.

While waiting for work at the new spot this morning, having read the lies-of-signs that said my old lab was closed, I fell asleep as I often do, setting the timer in my head to go off before work not specifying how soon before, because otherwise it could fail to ever go off and I would sleep for all time. Today the advance time my internal gave me was thirty minutes, which is a fine amount.
Until thirty minutes before work, then, I slept and dreamt. And dreamt.

And I do not like the explanation that dreams are strict retellings of things, or solely based on recent events, because without some abstract metaphorical impressions, this shit hits hard on that explanation.
Dreams are for a lot of things, and this time, they were for reminding me what it is like to fight for one's life:

I had a new job in a fancy old house and was midway through the training for working there, some kind of converted office. The training was sleeping in a chamber of sorts, although it looked like a large desk when I got out of it. There were straps in there to keep me strapped in, and a window so I could see out while sleeping. I was being let out, when some inspectors came, and I had a feeling that they were up to no good or impostors or something. Everyone in the office (no one I recognized) lined up in the hall, and when the line got to my room, someone ducked and rolled in, and someone else yelled my name and told me to look away from the weapon blast that was coming.
Then it was all dark and I felt a pulse. I opened my eyes and was sitting on a rock in the middle of the sea, having a fun chat in the sun with some mer people. The tone was radically different, far less intense but still dark somehow. I remembered that the weapon was supposed to scramble things somehow and further decided I was dreaming, at which point I told the person in front of me so and walked out the door onto some campus or something and she seemed to also understand that I was dreaming and not particularly care. There was a guy there too but I didn't recognize either of them. I felt a kind of biting pain at my ass and after a moment couldn't ignore it. The couch was digging into me and I awoke to find I was back in an office-house setting sitting on a couch next to some co-workers with the cushions pinching. We went outside and then I remembered that the weapons they used somehow mixed everything up and could change situations and settings if they shoot you. They can also backfire though, because once outside, there were two of them--sorta robot people with thin necks and dressed in brown trenchcoats with fadoras. One of them leaped out into the street and made to shoot with his future weapon and I pulled out a gun and aimed a shot at him. Everything slowed down and I saw the second one of them standing behind something ready to fire. My shot went off, so did his. Then we were back to full speed and in a different city. The leaping one had landed and guttered, losing his weapon and his life as metal pieces fell off of his face. His weapon made my shot more deadly by scrambling the situation, and I chuckled at the dumb bastard for a second while grabbing his nerf weapon and getting into a regular firefight (instead of a time-space firefight) with the one who had been behind a car. This one now had no hat and a blank metal face. It was about then my timer went off and I really woke up, suddenly experiencing none of the intensity I just then had been.

In my dreams.

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