smoke shop strangeness
Feb. 25th, 2013 12:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingOn Friday night I had the weirdest anxiety dream -- mostly because it was a perfectly normal anxiety dream and I never have those.
I dreamed I was staffing the counter at the smoke shop all alone, though it was the middle of a sunny afternoon. I was mobbed by annoying customers and things kept going wrong. The lotto machine screen kept flickering so I'd have to hit keys two or three times to get any reaction, and then it would print extra tickets that I couldn't cancel and which the customers didn't want to buy. One customer was this horrible smirking frat boy type trying to impress his girlfriend by being picky about fancy tobacco products. Another was twenty cents short of the price of a candy bar and kept arguing with me about how he'd bought it for only 75 cents just yesterday. And so on and so forth. When I finally got a minute's break I ran out back to ask my coworker when she'd be back from lunch (said coworker being AD, who hasn't actually been my coworker for a couple years now), she had put her coat on and told me she was leaving because of a family emergency or something.
And then I looked at the security system monitor and realized I had yet another customer -- a college girl who wanted me to grind her a few pounds of coffee. At which point, as I walked toward the coffee barrels (which we keep in front of one of our two display windows), I realized I'd been completely naked except for socks, slippers, and underpants for the whole preceding chain of events.
*headdesk*
I told the coffee girl I'd be with her in just a minute, ran out to the back room and threw on a t-shirt (one of my oversized pajama shirts, actually), and was trying to get my pants on and simultaneously ask AD why she hadn't told me I was naked. The pants wouldn't go over my hips, I was getting more and more worked up and frantic... and I realized the situation was ridiculous and unrealistic and must be a dream. So I woke up.
...
Occasionally I am very grateful that I am a semi-lucid dreamer -- not often to the point that I can control events in detail, but almost always to the point that I am aware that my dreams are dreams, not reality.
---------------
FYI, I am pretty sure the proximate cause of the dream was a series of extremely frustrating phone calls I had with Mr. Speakerphone (our owner) on Friday. He is absurdly paranoid -- for example, the reason we don't have penny jars by the registers is that he's afraid clerks would use the resulting stray pennies and nickels to keep track of the money we'd immediately start embezzling from him. Yeah, I know. He also once tried to get the employees at our Elmira store to list the make, model, year, and license plate numbers of any cars that might pick them up, plus the names and phone numbers of the car owners, so he could make sure that... they weren't stealing magazines and using getaway cars to carry the loot??? I don't even know. Also I think it is probably illegal to require employees to provide that kind of information, which is perhaps why that never went much of anywhere.
(The other reason it went nowhere is that PM, our manager, put her foot down. She spends most of her conversations with Mr. Speakerphone putting her foot down, because he knows nothing about retail. Our two shops are a really tiny and ancillary part of his business, which frankly I'm grateful for because it means PM is my de facto boss -- and unlike Mr. Speakerphone, she's both sane and awesome.)
Anyway, our Friday conversations basically boiled down to Mr. Speakerphone saying, "But such-and-such could be evidence of someone stealing, right?" and me saying either, "No, the explanation is obviously thus-and-so (dumbass)," or sometimes, "Well, maybe technically, but it's much more likely caused by simple human error. Sometimes we write things down wrong and have to fix them; that's just how the world works." He has a fundamental inability to grasp the concept of harmless errors and immediately assumes anything less than perfect must mean people are stealing from him.
I really think he needs psychiatric help.
I dreamed I was staffing the counter at the smoke shop all alone, though it was the middle of a sunny afternoon. I was mobbed by annoying customers and things kept going wrong. The lotto machine screen kept flickering so I'd have to hit keys two or three times to get any reaction, and then it would print extra tickets that I couldn't cancel and which the customers didn't want to buy. One customer was this horrible smirking frat boy type trying to impress his girlfriend by being picky about fancy tobacco products. Another was twenty cents short of the price of a candy bar and kept arguing with me about how he'd bought it for only 75 cents just yesterday. And so on and so forth. When I finally got a minute's break I ran out back to ask my coworker when she'd be back from lunch (said coworker being AD, who hasn't actually been my coworker for a couple years now), she had put her coat on and told me she was leaving because of a family emergency or something.
And then I looked at the security system monitor and realized I had yet another customer -- a college girl who wanted me to grind her a few pounds of coffee. At which point, as I walked toward the coffee barrels (which we keep in front of one of our two display windows), I realized I'd been completely naked except for socks, slippers, and underpants for the whole preceding chain of events.
*headdesk*
I told the coffee girl I'd be with her in just a minute, ran out to the back room and threw on a t-shirt (one of my oversized pajama shirts, actually), and was trying to get my pants on and simultaneously ask AD why she hadn't told me I was naked. The pants wouldn't go over my hips, I was getting more and more worked up and frantic... and I realized the situation was ridiculous and unrealistic and must be a dream. So I woke up.
...
Occasionally I am very grateful that I am a semi-lucid dreamer -- not often to the point that I can control events in detail, but almost always to the point that I am aware that my dreams are dreams, not reality.
---------------
FYI, I am pretty sure the proximate cause of the dream was a series of extremely frustrating phone calls I had with Mr. Speakerphone (our owner) on Friday. He is absurdly paranoid -- for example, the reason we don't have penny jars by the registers is that he's afraid clerks would use the resulting stray pennies and nickels to keep track of the money we'd immediately start embezzling from him. Yeah, I know. He also once tried to get the employees at our Elmira store to list the make, model, year, and license plate numbers of any cars that might pick them up, plus the names and phone numbers of the car owners, so he could make sure that... they weren't stealing magazines and using getaway cars to carry the loot??? I don't even know. Also I think it is probably illegal to require employees to provide that kind of information, which is perhaps why that never went much of anywhere.
(The other reason it went nowhere is that PM, our manager, put her foot down. She spends most of her conversations with Mr. Speakerphone putting her foot down, because he knows nothing about retail. Our two shops are a really tiny and ancillary part of his business, which frankly I'm grateful for because it means PM is my de facto boss -- and unlike Mr. Speakerphone, she's both sane and awesome.)
Anyway, our Friday conversations basically boiled down to Mr. Speakerphone saying, "But such-and-such could be evidence of someone stealing, right?" and me saying either, "No, the explanation is obviously thus-and-so (dumbass)," or sometimes, "Well, maybe technically, but it's much more likely caused by simple human error. Sometimes we write things down wrong and have to fix them; that's just how the world works." He has a fundamental inability to grasp the concept of harmless errors and immediately assumes anything less than perfect must mean people are stealing from him.
I really think he needs psychiatric help.
