Thirstaz Wandering Thoughts

My thoughts are wandering as I sit in the Pittsburgh Airport, looking out at the rain, eavesdropping on others’ conversations. Most of my focus keeps shifting to Mom’s paperwork. Her paperwork is just like our paperwork.

Pulling out every bill from 1998 on, I laugh. Notes are on sheets of paper and bills. Who was spoken to, time and date, result. Most simply end like that. No further updates. There are insurance and banking papers, visits to hospitals, doctors, and specialists, and the ever-present pile of warranties.

We are the same back home. For the last how many decades, paperwork was needed for ‘just in case’ reference. Bills and payment records could go wrong, and it was incumbent on us to prove what we did. Even then, that sometimes isn’t enough and required we the customer to scale the corporate ladder past the drones and managerial kings and queens until a person was reached who could overrule the bureaucracy.

The paperwork at Mom’s has some interesting personal choices. Lot of paper clippings for things done by her children back in 1970 through 2010. Yellowed, brittle clippings of newspaper death notices for family members and friends. Crisp sheets of white papers in file folders with emails from family printed out. Things from me from my last days in the military in 1995. Travel information for visits in 1998, 2005, etc.

Mom is now battling Verizon. We’ve all been involved in this fight. It’s classic enshittification. Gotta sign in to do anything with them. Calling them? Hahahahaha. What a joker you are. Should be a stand up with your own HBO or Netflix comedy special. Calling them provided us with a window when it would be okay to call them. Mom had it down to fifteen minutes and counted it down to one, phone in hand, doing little else. The appointed minute arrived. Mom moved her hand. “Oops.” Gone! Her new wait time to reach them was eight hours later.

Meanwhile, we parsed Mom’s crazy notes for userIDs and passwords. Several were found for Verizon. None worked. One sister then went through the ‘Forgot Password’ route and tried to change the password. Hahahahahaha. Easier to turn an apple into a ruby.

This is modern life, yeah? At least in first world America, and maybe only among my family. I, of course, cheat. I maintain a spreadsheet of passwords. 112 lines. They’re for my accounts and my wife’s accounts. If that thing ever falls into the wrong hands, it’d be disaster for us. It’s encrypted and password protected. Every time I go in for surgery, I remind my wife of the password.

All of this has cause us to resolve, do a pare down. Purge paperwork and warranties. Get ruthless about it, and damn the consequences.

The Sky Message Dream

I was working in a new restaurant. Many others were there. A number of us were middle managers but didn’t have assigned duties. We’d go around making ourselves useful and organizing things. As I was doing that, I noticed a lot of dust and set out to dust things off. My dusting caused more accumulated dust, so I backed off. The dust seemed odd to me, and I spent time feeling it, trying to figure out what it was.

A tall, geeky friend was there. He was trying to serve drinks with ice in tall glasses. Each time, though, he spilled the drinks or dropped them altogether. I told him, “Maybe this isn’t for you.”

A loud commotion pulled us to another room where employees were around a large television. It was showing a night sky. A message was written in the dark in large, white letters. None of us knew the language. Guesses about who may have written grew. Many people, including me, thought it was extraterrestrials. What kind of message could they be giving us? A threat, a question, a promise? Was this a good omen or something sinister?

I resumed working. Now I was helping another person construct some furniture. It was strangely squared off, tall, and light gray. The tall geek walked in, said, “Oh, no,” and dropped a tray full of drinks right as he reached a table of customers. We were all horrified but then realized they were fake drinks and he had dropped them as a joke. Someone started dusting. I warned them about the increased dust. He saw that happen, too. We discussed whether we could do something differently or use a cloth with a different material. I left him with nothing resolved.

I instead went off and got a tray of food. The tray was red. Someone said, “All of your food is green.” I saw they were right — I had a green salad, green beans, and peas. My dessert was red gelatin, though. Standing around the tray on the table, people joked that I should have gone for the green gelatin.

I was told the boss wanted to see me and went off to find her. She was on the move. As I tried to catch up, people kept interrupting me with questions about how something should be done. Hearing that the boss was outside, I left the building.

The tall geek came out, calling me and hurrying towards me. He said he needed the password to get into the system. I told him it was shoo. As he repeated it with some surprise, I went on about a trick I’d learned to circumvent logging in every time. He seemed confused by it and went away to a silver SUV. I thought he was going to get in and drive away but he put something he was carrying into the vehicle and then walked back towards the building.

I began going off to find more to do. It had been light but was suddenly dark. Looking up, I saw another message written in the night sky. It was like Someone had used chalk on a giant blackboard. I called out for other to see it and recognized it was a different message from before. It also seemed to be in a different writing. I thought that maybe our sky was being used as a message board for alien groups. I began believing that I could figure the dream out and was going to go to the computer to see what I could find about the previous message, if other messages were being seen and if the message was being seen in all night skies.

Dream end.

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