29 January 2002

I dreamt that my family was in the business of making pocket hard drives, and apparently Microsoft had announced they were going to be coming in and basically taking over the pocket drive industry. They were having their big kickoff announcement party at a zoo-- they'd rented the elephant enclosure, which was this big deep bowl full of jungley terrain and such, and had paid for the elephants to be stored somewhere else for a while. The floor of the entire enclosure was ringed with prototype models of their introductory drive model.

My father had been invited as a guest to the event, sort of a gratuitous Fuck You Very Nicely gesture on Microsoft's part, and we decided to engage in a little corporate espionage. My sisters sat up on the edge of the enclosure with binoculars, taking notes on who all the guests in attendance were, while my dad kept the Microsoft staff very busy with questions they didn't want to answer. While they were thus distracted, however, I dangled out over the edge of the enclosure, hanging from the railing by my feet, and reached down with a long pincer-arm thing to snake one of the prototypes up where we could take a look at it. It turned out to be a fairly unimpressive piece of engineering, but we knew that wasn't going to make any difference in the long run.

It was built pretty rugged, though, because when I chucked it back down into the elephant pen, it bounced several times without breaking.