reams are so strange. They can be so vivid and memorable and yet make no sense, or seem utterly insignificant, devoid of deeper meaning.
I awoke from a dream in which I went back to Paradise Corp (an anonymization) to plead for my old job back. The building was still in Burbank, but when I got to the IT department, it was a transformed space. It resembled the trendy, loft-like interiors of some of those web 2.0 tech firms that make their work areas vaguly resemble a Starbucks or a Chuck E Cheese. I once interviewed at a place like that in Santa Monica (and now, years later, I can’t for the life of me remember if I was offered the job or not – but I remember the interview pretty vividly, because they asked me to solve a weird, complex, recursive SQL programming problem on the fly, and I felt kind of stumped by it, but showed them how I would find the answer; and the man leading the interview looked exactly like Mark Zuckerberg). There had been sofas and bean-bag chairs and long tables with giant flat screen monitors and little meeting tables like in a kindergarten.
The other thing about the IT department in this dream was that it had shrunk. It essentially only occupied the one large, well-decorated room. I asked the rather generic man showing me around what had happened: “Where did everyone go?”
“Oh, it’s all outsourced, now,” he responded in a singsongy voice. “Mostly to Bangalore and Hyderabad.”
This made some weird sense, and reflected trends that had been developing when I was still at the company, but I was undiplomatic: I responded, “Are you sure it isn’t just that the company has shrunk?”
This earned me a very realistic glare from my former boss, Tom, who was there but refusing to interact with me. He stalked off in search of an elevator.
All the remembered denizens of the IT department were sitting at these long tables, working. Some didn’t even have computers, though – they had paper notebooks open and pencils. Looking more closely, a lot of them were studying phonics flashcards with words like “cat” and “cake” on them (symbolically in line with my current job, teaching elementary students English). Some of them had cups of chicken nuggets with hotsauce, from the Aroha cup-chicken fast-food place downstairs (here in Ilsan, I mean).
One of my former coworkers wanted to make small talk, but I was trying to get at what they wanted me to do now that I’d returned. “What kind of database are you trying to design, now?” I asked.
There was nothing to do – it’d all been outsourced. I asked the man with the singsongy voice what this “rump” of an IT department was actually doing. “We’re mostly keeping them because we feel sorry for them,” he explained. He made an expansive gesture around at the tables. Several of the erstwhile programmers were squabbling and skuffling over a comic book (again, I now teach elementary students, right?).
I looked around at my former coworkers, and saw the signs – the lack of computers, the fact they were doing crossword puzzles or sudoku or studying phonics flashcards. This was no IT department – it was a sort of retirement facility. And I had asked for this “job” back?
I said, “Maybe I should just go back to Korea.” My former coworkers looked sad, but they all seemed to understand. Karen nodded, sagely.
I walked back out of the old building in Burbank to find myself in a Seoul subway station. I was confused, though, and couldn’t figure out how to get to the orange #3 line, that I could use to get home. I studied a map on a wall for what seemed a very long time. Maybe an entire day. After that, I wandered through the subway until I found a bowl of samgyetang (a sort of whole-chicken stew) sitting on a ledge in one of the tunnels. My backpack sat beside it, which seemed unremarkable, but which I suddenly realized I’d been missing. I looked at the samgyetang, but found it unappetizing.
I felt a huge sadness in me.
I woke up.
