Sleepless

Am I dreaming?

Ah, sleep. It’s the solitary charging station that is inaccessible to anyone else. Theoretically. In reality, work keeps finding its way into my dreams. I don’t plan on dreaming about work but somehow it happens, even if I binge five episodes of whatever TV series I’m into before lying down.

I like to separate my home and work life, creating a nice balance that psychologists are always banging on about. The reason they’re always banging on about it, of course, is because it’s heavily weighted in work’s favor. A nice dinner and a movie can’t compete with eight or so hours of work repetition, drama, and stress.

My worst work dreams happened when I worked at the library. Yes, the library! It wasn’t any library. It was at the downtown library of one of the biggest library systems in the United States. Saturdays and Sundays contained crowds indistinguishable from those at Disneyland. You thought that the library was a nice, quiet place to work? Haha! Noooo. Not that one. One Saturday, a librarian (let us call him a hero), yelled out “People! Go to the mall!” He was a great librarian, but those crowds tested the professionalism of us all.

The checkout desk was in a giant cathedral lobby that allowed lines of patrons to go back as far as the eye could see, which they did. Patrons would place holds on books and movies they wanted to check out, and those were kept on a series of shelves behind the checkout desk that wrapped around the lower level.

Residents could check out a maximum of seventy-five books, 12 movies, 12 CDs, as well as a variety of other materials. Some people saw that as a ridiculously high number, while others saw it as a challenge. Needless to say, on weekends I never stopped moving and checking out holds for patrons.

I dreamed about it. I dreamed that patrons were in my apartment wanting their books. Holds were in my kitchen cabinets, my dishwasher, and my bathtub. People were everywhere and they all wanted me to check out their books. I was pushing people out my front door, but more were streaming in, slowly with dead-eyed resolution.

I was having a zombie dream with library patrons. I woke myself up screaming “GET OUT!” I’m kind of an idiot when it comes to recognizing red flags and warning signs, but even I knew that it was time to move on. Shortly after that I switched careers to be a graphic artist. There was no way I was ever going to have dreams about needy library patrons again. I was safe.

Then I started having dreams about a horrible Marketing Director and all of the ads that I had to produce. That went on forever.

This is why I don’t believe in a work/life balance. It doesn’t exist for dreamers. We need to have a little light installed on our foreheads. When it’s green, that means we are fully recharged and can return to work. It may take a couple of days for that green light to turn on. Be patient.

When I made this comic, I was the sole employee at a little store that was a satellite location of a bigger place. Their hours were 9:00am-7:00pm. I arrived early, opened the store, stayed all day, closed the store, cleaned up and left. For five months.

I eventually got in trouble because I wasn’t fully participating in meetings.

This prayer does not work.

Work dreams don’t just affect you, they also annoy the hell out of your significant other. This is a good thing because if you lack perspective about your work/life balance, they certainly will not. They may grab you, still in pajamas, and advise you with the sort of confidence that you are lacking. “FIND ANOTHER JOB!”

Here we combine my graphic art and customer service jobs. One can be performed without pants. Please know that not wearing pants does not mean that you are immune to stress. It just means that you can get stressed out in your underwear.

I would add a comma to this comic if I could quickly find the original, but sifting through hundreds of comics is time consuming. I would seek the advise of a librarian to better organize all of my files, but I’m not waiting in that line.

The worst is “talking” to a customer from your bed. The customer isn’t there, of course, but you’re somehow combining the dream state and reality. I think I handle customers better when I’m half asleep, but only from my bed. If I’m at a service counter and half asleep it doesn’t go so well.

Some days I do amazingly well on no sleep, but for the most part it’s a complete disaster. Sleep is my dearest friend, but also a bitter enemy. If there’s any sure-fire way of not dreaming about work, it’s to avoid going to sleep. It sounds like a great idea at two in the morning. Not so much at two in the afternoon.

I would conclude this by saying “sweet dreams”, but that’s what my mother always said to me and it didn’t work.