14 October 2002

C wanted to flirt with exhibitionism a little bit; she wanted to swing naked on a swing in a park. Fortunately, her landlord owned an apartment that had a small park behind it, so we went there. The swing was sort of down in a small river; while we were there, I noticed there were a bunch of boys about age 10 or so who ended up getting sort of an eyeful. Made their day, no doubt.

As we were leaving, I noticed a wooden stairway that led up to the upper floor of the apartment; it continued up above the apartment, forming a tower. The stair looked pretty solid from the front but if you looked at it from the side you could see it was actually all fragmented-- like one of those perspective constructs that looks like an object when viewed through a pinhole, but it's actually fifty floating pieces of triangular material separate from each other. It was some sort of art installation, not a stairway at all.

Then I went to work. Apparently, there was concern about layoffs. Everyone was saying that there were no layoffs but people were disappearing left and right. It was '97 all over again, trying to secure other groups to escape to if my own were to evaporate. But reqs were tight everywhere; it was looking sort of likely that I'd get laid off in the next few weeks. Since I knew the layoff package wasn't going to be all that big, I decided to take a couple months' pay equivalent in stolen equipment-- laser printers and stuff. But apparently everyone else had had the same thought, too, because most of the hardware was gone, just like the people. Slipped out quietly in the night or something.

Jeff M successfully found an old personal laserjet of some sort, and a network card that could be added to it. I mostly spent the dream wandering the halls nomadically-- the building looked totally different, it was more like a giant luxury hotel-- searching for hardware to scavenge and people to talk to about coming to their group.