Oh, the jobs we once held
My dreams about work peaked and concluded in June when I left USAT. The time since has been relatively dream-free, work or otherwise. But an old job showed up in a dream last night, and it was my own fault.
In what I can remember now of the dream, an angry man stood on the other side of the street with a shotgun, shooting at my house. A little like M. Emmet Walsh in The Jerk, yes. (Did I read an article about Steve Martin just before bed last night? Yes.) He walked away, and I ran out and yelled at him. He dropped the shotgun. The police arrested him.
The cops got his name, and in the dream I recognized it… from real life. He was someone who I'd seen a month or so ago on LinkedIn… in real life. He'd sent me a Connection invite several months previous, and I'd finally gotten around to accepting it. In the dream, mutual friends were responsible for giving him my contact. I warned them. Then I woke up.
Back in real life this morning, leaving bed and shaking off the dream, I wondered who the man was. At the time I accepted the Connection, I remembered him as a reader. But had I checked my e-mail for what his story was? No. I had just assumed, given the LinkedIn invite, he was a friendly one. This assumption was a bad one. He was not so friendly.
The man had a history of making racist remarks and claiming reverse racism. Most of his trouble had occurred in 2008, back when I had to write a personal note to everyone we booted. "Are you a Negro to ??" he replied. "Or is it African American, Idiot." Early 2010, he resurfaced, presumably after a site moderator ejected a fresh account of his, and well after I was out of the reader role. He wrote, "Get a real job man, you Racist Pig." In LinkedIn lingo, we'd sure done business together.
Who knew why the guy had sent me a Connection invite. Most likely, he didn't realize it. E-mailing probably auto-added me to his address book. Then he may have joined LinkedIn and imported all the listings. Many people did that. Who knew what he thought when I accepted!
I removed our Connection. If a dream could find a lapse in my social network privacy and send me to researching, it deserved respect.
November 8th, 2010 at 9:59 AM
Wow, that is super creepy!! But I'm impressed your subconscious gave you a kick in the butt like that.
I'm lucky in that I don't work for a specific publication/station, so I don't deal with users myself – I just help build the tools for those who do. But yeah, I do dream about that a lot (the tools, how they should work etc). I dreamed a lot about moderation when we were working on it a few weeks/months ago. It's not fun – it's like there's a work switch that I can't shut off, not when I go home, not even when I go to bed. You need to let me in on your secret on how to avoid that now that you changed jobs.
November 8th, 2010 at 12:21 PM
Man! I'm really glad you spared me from the Freddy Kruegers online. I've heard from other moderators and they've received their fair share of death threats. This is serious business. We need security detail!
November 9th, 2010 at 12:30 AM
Oh man. 2008 was a rough time for civility online, yeah? I think I probably learned more about community that summer than anytime before or since.
Happy to report that my dreams stay mostly free of characters from my work life, but this reminds me it's probably a good time to check the FB rolls. :)
Hope you're well and the gig is good!
November 27th, 2010 at 12:08 PM
Glad this connected a little!
Mathilde, your comment about unplugging got me pulling out notes today from a product research session a few years ago. A newlywed couple talked about their getting-home rituals. The wife had previously had a long commute, which she used for decompressing with the radio. When she changed hospitals and her commute got much shorter, she ran straight into her husband at home, and that was no good. They eventually realized this and adjusted for it. (He gave her space when she got home, etc.)
Anyway, it made me think at the time: If I can't naturally let the day drift away (and I can't), I need to establish rituals that help out. User-centered design self-help. :) Tivo-ing TV Land's daytime airing of Cheers and watching it as I made dinner turned out to be huge. Now it's reading non-work stuff on the train.
And Outlook. Honestly. Getting Outlook at my home machine and scheduling life on it has been bizarrely life-changing. When I saw life stuff on the same appointment level as work stuff, a better balance almost immediately felt right.
January 2nd, 2011 at 6:19 PM
[...] the angry reader who hated me? And then added me as a LinkedIn connection? Now he's invited me to be his Facebook [...]
July 4th, 2011 at 7:32 AM
[...] work dreams came regularly. At NPR, until last night, I had only had one that I could remember, and it was about USAT. Last night, just about a year into my current job, and before my return from a week's [...]