Elias Howe dreamed up the modern sewing machine. Dmitri Mendeleev dreamed up the periodic table of elements.
Mary Shelley dreamed up Frankenstein. Paul McCartney of The Beatles dreamed up the song “Yesterday.”
My dreams aren’t so world-changing. But they are unsettling.
Perhaps as a retired Boomer you, too, have suffered from work dreams. If so, you may be due compensation. Call to join the class-action lawsuit.
Petersen
Some background: I worked for 40-plus years as a journalist. In the last few, at the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin, I was a copy editor with a shaky relationship with technology.
However, my dreams don’t involve the U-B or any other newsroom where I worked my fingers to the bone and got bony fingers. The dreams occur in new, exciting locations where I have been hired over hundreds of younger people with boundless energy and ambition. My coworkers are all good looking and quick witted — with considerably more capacity for humor than the cast of the television series “The Paper” (a spinoff of “The Office”). I enjoy my coworkers’ jokes and the cackles of laughter that fill the newsroom.
I am worried they will discover the old goat in their midst.
The dreams involve work piling up, machines breaking down and information technology specialists always being on a cruise to Alaska.
I have 101 things to do. More work leaps on the dog pile every five minutes. Smartphone alarms go off. Office phones ring incessantly. A mushroom cloud of smoke rises from my failing work computer.
I’m terrified the tower of cards is about to come tumbling down.
My housing is overpriced, and I am paid the same as a 16-year-old burger flipper. I am slower, mentally and physically, than I was in my prime. The molehill in my inbox has become a mountain.
I try to think faster. I chase down sources and can’t hear them clearly over the phone. When did the subjects of stories become low talkers?
The subjects I meet in person talk at warp speed. I struggle to scribble notes. I scratch down every 10th word and am terrified I will not be able to fill in gaps and write a coherent story.
I get in a complicated game of telephone tag. All the sources I need to contact are unavailable — maybe on cruises to Alaska.
When I finally wake up, it’s a huge relief. I realize I do not have to throw on clothes and rush to a workplace and complete that mountain of work. It is not Thursday. Everything is not due Friday.
The work dreams are unnerving, but it could be worse. Imagine if I had spent my career dancing with a jackhammer or crawling around on a beam on the 99th story of a skyscraper.
Imagine an old guy dancing with a jackhammer that is dragging him down the street and shaking loose his teeth. Imagine an old guy with shaky balance teetering on a beam high above a city while a curious crowd gathers below waiting for the inevitable.
I look forward to the day the work dreams end. I look forward to the day, as in McCartney’s “Yesterday,” when troubles seem far away, when I am retired from not only work but also work dreams.
In the song, McCartney longs for yesterday. Not me. I’m happy with today — especially when I wake up and realize I am not drowning in a sea of work.
