Friday, June 15, 2018

long sales presentations; criminal heroes

Dream 1

I was in a big, open room, maybe something like a preschool classroom mixed with an office floor. Some of the stuff in the room, like maybe the carpets and some of the furniture, was brightly multicolored, like in a preschool classroom. But the lighting was pale fluorescent, and there were office machines and some drab- or pale-colored office furnishings around, too.

I stood against a wall with two other people: a coworker who may have been a friend, and my old boss and mentor AB. One of the two, probably AB, may have been sitting against the wall, directly to my right/in front of me (I think my right shoulder leaned against the wall) on a high chair, like a baby's mealtime highchair without the table-like front. The other person may have been standing to AB's right or sitting, maybe on a filing cabinet or something.

This was some kind of company. And AB had come in just to see how everything was going, just because he cared about the people here, not because he had anything to do with the operations of the company.

My coworker probably said that things were going well. And I agreed. I only felt one thing was wrong, which was that some of the salespeople were always insisting on giving really long sales presentations. They were boring as hell, and I felt like it negatively impacted sales. But it may also have been something either that I no longer had to deal with, as I was in a separated position now, or that had naturally kind of stopped happening a while ago.

But I still wanted to complain about this, apparently. And I tried to say it. But maybe I didn't say it the right way. AB listened to me, but didn't quite get what I'd said. He said either that he didn't think salespeople doing long presentations was a bad thing, or that he would teach me later on how to do long sales presentations, because he now apparently thought that's what I wanted to do.

This whole issue, which I'd previously brought up only in an attempt to bring up some problem, so I wasn't acting like everything was perfect, now became for me some dire attempt to prove to AB that something actually was wrong with the company.

I now managed to pull AB around a corner, into a long, unlit hallway cluttered along the walls with office machines and furniture, and at the end of which was another huge, fluorescent-lit room, this one full of cubicles.

I had pulled AB pretty close and was speaking in a low voice, like I was trying to convey a really important and dire secret about the company. I was writing on some piece of paper with some printed out lines or grids on it. The paper may have been taped to the wall.

I tried to explain again to AB how bad it had been for sales that the salespeople always insisted on giving long sales presentations. But AB only said that he understood, and that he would teach me as soon as he could how to give long sales presentations. He even seemed to indicate that he would talk to management, to make sure that everybody started giving much longer sales presentations from now on.

I was now totally upset and worried. But AB walked back out into the preschool-like room, just a meter or so away from the entrance to the unlit hallway. I followed him.

All the way across the room, one of my recent acquaintances, KW, walked in, from the left corner of the room. He stood in front of a low set of bookshelves, like children's bookshelves.

AB saw KW and waved to get his attention. KW waved back. I could tell that AB liked KW a lot. But now I remembered that KW was the person who had given the really long sales presentations.

But now I also remembered that KW had actually stopped giving the really long sales presentations quite some time ago. But I had let myself get so caught up in trying to explain a situation that had already passed that I had made it sound like it was still a big problem.

I now started to worry about whether AB would go complain to KW or about KW because I had said his sales presentations were too long. I, like AB, liked KW. In fact, I'd just made friends with him. I thought it would be really stupid of me if I had just gone to such pains to discuss an old problem that I would now make KW think I didn't like him.

I may have thought that I should now start talking to AB about how the problem with long sales presentations really didn't exist. But I may possibly have hesitated about doing that. I'd seen how complaining about the long sales presentations had backfired on me. I may possibly now have been afraid that saying anything else would backfire on me even worse.

Dream 2

There may have been a news report that two gay activists in town had been assassinated. The news spoke about how they'd been assassinated. But then the news immediately started talking about how the activists were criminals. The news had probably implied they'd been involved in some sort of extortion activity. Where only a short while ago the two gay activists had been positioned as heroes, they were now being positioned as villains who'd deserved to die.

I couldn't quite believe what the news was saying. Yet I couldn't totally discount it. If it was true, I would be really disappointed. But it seemed a little too convenient, given how, I felt, sentiment was changing and shifting against gays recently, that these two gay activists should be assassinated and that immediately thereafter the news should start positioning them as criminals. It only seemed to fit in with what I thought were ill-intentioned trends.

I may have seen an image, like on a television, of a crowd of people all clamoring to get into some sort of mass-transit vehicle like a trolley on a pale-grey asphalt or concrete street. The trolley-like vehicle (hooked to overhead wires, running on a track, etc.) was painted white. There was a huge crowd all around the trolley. But the sidewalks nearby were also crowded, like this was in some huge, busy town. The imagery was all blurry, like a modern image trying to mimic the wavy, distorted quality of 1980s color TV.

No comments:

Post a Comment