Creative Spelling

Had an especially nerdy dream last night.

I was being chased by people, they were shooting, I was shooting. I didn’t know my surroundings, but kept seeing familiar faces. I’d run out and across some ledge in a dark city. I wasn’t in immediate danger so I looked around to get a handle on things. All the buildings looked futuristic, unfamiliar, yet very pretty. Lights were glowing from behind the buildings, outlining them all and impressing upon me just how massive they really were, even from a distance. I felt like I was in a movie just looking at them. I turned to keep moving, to get away from danger, but I tripped.

My ears rang for a moment as I picked myself up, but looking around I noticed everything looked different. Still futuristic by my standards, but more broken-in and worn down. They were definitely different buildings, and it was now daylight. Someone was still chasing me, and I was still wearing my combat gear and carrying a couple guns. The ledge I’d been running along was now a floating walkway between two buildings, though I couldn’t tell by what means it was staying elevated. I continued in the direction away from my trackers.

The now rounded cement walkway beneath me seemed to materialize as I ran across it. I could see the building I was approaching and entrances at each level of the building below me. I saw people heading up flights of stairs to the doors, both of which came into existence as they were needed. I got to the door area on my level but wasn’t sure how to activate the entrance. I was still catching my breath and rationalizing to myself, “Nobody seems alarmed at how the doors open, they are obviously used to it… You just need to open the door and worry about getting somewhere safe or finding someone to help…” I heard some voices on the other side of the cement wall, a man shouting, a girl crying. The wall made a rumble and a small, rounded door formed. I jumped aside to avoid being seen. The girl climbed out of the hole and stopped when she saw me. She said something to me but I couldn’t quite understand what she was asking. I had to squeeze a little bit to get through the doorway, I noticed the cement wall was over a foot thick.

Inside, I was standing in a curved hallway, it was dimly lit. The man I heard yelling before was standing there, as if guarding something, but didn’t act alarmed to see me. He looked familiar. I tried to give an expression of recognition as I turned left, toward the only room I could see.

I went through a regular door this time, but when I closed it and turned around to assess the situation, I found myself somewhere else again. No cement walls, no hidden doors. Now I was greeted by people familiar to me, Helo, the Chief, and over in a chair next to the windows, the Admiral. They were asking me friendly questions I didn’t have relevant answers to. They knew me, but I had no memory of what they were asking. “What do you hear, Starbuck?”

“Nothing but the rain.”

I just happened to be at my address of residence in the last couple weeks when a couple of UPS guys showed up at the door asking some questions.

They told me they were following up on the claim about the missing packages from 3 months prior – the missing monitor and the missing padded envelope that were “delivered” at the same time on the same day.  They just asked me to confirm that we never received the packages and to tell him how we found out they were missing.  So I relayed to him the facts that two people were home at the time of the “delivery” and neither of them heard anyone at the door or on the porch, and also that we had arrived at the house 10 minutes after the packages were “delivered” and saw nothing on the porch.  One of the men asked if we looked around the house to check, and I told him we walked all around the house, walked up and down the street to see if we could see it on a neighbor’s porch, and went so far as to check the “east” version of my address [on a "west" street].  He told me he’d spoken to the driver from that day and that the driver informed him he left the packages on the porch behind the chairs.  It didn’t occur to me at the time, but after they left I glanced around the neighborhood and saw how many porches have chairs on them.  I confirmed again that neither of the people IN THE HOUSE at the time heard anyone delivering a package, and that I thought it was very unlikely someone from the neighborhood would sneak up in those 10 minutes and manage to steal a large box full of monitor plus the padded envelope without anyone noticing.

He seemed convinced by this and asked me to sign some paperwork to conclude their investigation.  Then he told me all packages delivered to that address from now on will require a signature.  It won’t be an option you have to check when buying something online, it will just always go through their system that way to avoid losses in the future.  Again, I didn’t say anything at the time, but upon reflection, I should have asked why signatures were not standard or required on goods valued in the hundreds of dollars, especially those like monitors which are shipped in the monitor box such that anyone could understand the contents and worth.

In the end, it wasn’t the shipper that really saved that experience, but the online retailer who sent out a replacement for both missing packages without much hassle on the customer’s end.  If we’d had to wait on UPS to resolve the issue, it would have been 3 months instead of 2-3 weeks.