I was at work and things were weird.
First they were shuffling desks around, which made me really upset because I was back by my old group in an open floor plan setting and it felt like I was getting a demotion. Then they fixed it and said that I was really supposed to be somewhere completely different, so that was fine.
Then I was supposed to be looking into an issue for a specific customer where we didn’t work a ticket on-time, and the customer was allegedly pretty upset but a lot of folks were just trying to sweep it under the rug. I refused to let it go, so I kept digging and was pissing a few people off here and there until I finally got to the root of it and could verify that we definitely hadn’t worked their ticket completely – somebody had written the code for the customer, but it hadn’t been tested yet so they didn’t technically have it, although the manager in charge was trying to be shady and said that it really wasn’t that big of a deal…
So we got in a big verbal fight that escalated to us yelling at each other on the floor and at one point he threatened to beat me up. His wife also happened to work there, who I got along with a bit better, but she got into it, too, until I finally walked away and still refused to let it go. When she came over to my desk and wanted to confront me on it, I finally straight up told her that the problem had always just been that her husband was a gigantic asshole … which she didn’t want to hear at first, but then something else happened.
Apparently it all clicked and she knew that I was right, and then she went back and told him that she was going to divorce him for it!
He was pretty mad at me about that…
And so began the great chase – I first ducked into a stairwell when I saw him sprinting towards my desk and shouting, and we played hide and seek around the stairs and the hallways for a bit until I finally ended up outside and decided to just make a run for it. I took off sprinting – apparently home – down this mostly dirt road, assuming that my assailant was still in hot pursuit.
At one point a group of runners approached from behind and easily caught up with me because I’d been running for a while at that point. I was afraid that he was part of the group, but they said that he wasn’t, but also that he wasn’t far behind them, which forced me to go cross-country and take off into the woods in an attempt to duck him.
After running through the woods for a long while, I came to this almost Alice in Wonderland-y-like scene where a river ran through the forest and these giant, colorful flowers sort of provided a canopy of cover over the entire thing. From the flowers hung these vines that I could swing on, and I found that I could cover a lot more ground by swinging close to the water, although I also worried that somehow maybe my assailant could see how the flowers were being pulled down as I swung and would still be able to track me that way…
But he didn’t, and several miles away at that point I came to the end of the patch of giant flowers and found an old campground with a shower area where I could rest for a while. I had been running for several hours and had covered a lot of ground, but now I knew that I also had a long way to go to get back to civilization, or so I thought. I crashed inside of the building and was awoken when people started coming and going as they do and I realized that the campground wasn’t actually abandoned after all.
Mingling around for a while after I cleaned myself up, I made a couple of friends and we wandered into this general store in the campground that contained all sorts of random junk that one tends to find at your average camp store. One thing that the store also contained that you don’t tend to find, however, was Kevin Smith – the director – who was apparently just hanging out and quickly made friends with us as well. We chatted for a while and he said that we should come hang out with him back at his place, and we browsed the store together and he pointed out a few great deals.
The store had a surprising amount of pop culture and comic book-type stuff, so I guess that’s where his expertise came in. We found a grey, plastic ray gun from an old cartoon series that was marked down from $1 to a mere $0.75 and we both agreed that one couldn’t not buy something like that at such discount prices! The guy also had some Magic: The Gathering and Marvel cards tucked away in a box, but I worried that maybe he actually knew what they were worth so I didn’t even ask about those…
Eventually we decided that we needed to get back and said goodbye, and kept walking until we reached what was like a mobile computer center for work that had workstations and whatnot. And so one of the guys suggested that we check on the ticket to see if maybe it had gotten taken care of while I was away. We approached one of the computers, half expecting the guy to jump out at us or have smashed it in advance or something, but nothing happened and we were able to pull the thing up and review the ticket log without incident.
The stupid ticket still hadn’t been completed.
