Dream: The Long Drive to Work

I begin my drive to work.  But I decide to go in a different direction, following a very roundabout route that will allow me to drive past a doctor's office that I need to visit later in the week.

I'm driving on a quiet residential side street. I encounter three stop signs that are less than fifty yards apart.  They are for even smaller roads that intersect from the right and are totally inappropriate and unnecessary.  How annoying.  I definitely won't want to take this route every day.

I come to an intersection with a main road.  I look at the choices of which way to go.  I don't have written directions - I'm navigating by feel.  If a road appears to go in the direction I need to go in, I'll take it.  I'd like to take a right turn and then another immediate right turn that would take me past a cemetery, but that second road is closed off with a wire fence.  Still, a right turn seems to be a good choice here, so I decide to go that way.

But the traffic is heavy - I'll need to wait a long time before I can enter the road.  Every so often it seems that there's a gap in the line of cars that I could pull out into, but then another car appears in that gap just before I decide to go.  At one such time I start to inch out, and then the car stops to allow me to go.  So I go.

Unfortunately, my car fails to accelerate well.  Perhaps the air cleaner or fuel filter is clogged because I can't seem to get the car to go faster than 20 mph.  I'm frustrated because I just had work done on the car yesterday.  I wonder what the mechanic did to the car aside from the work on the suspension that I requested.  And I feel especially bad for the driver who allowed me to go. 

Eventually I make it to my mechanics shop.  But the shop is closed.  There are two guys there though, but they won't be able to help me.

The scene changes so that I'm at work in a conference room.  The two guys are now customers who want us to design and implement impedance matching networks for filters that they bought from a competitor.  It's a cheeky thing for them to ask for.  But in business, the saying, "The customer is always right," keeps me from chiding them on their impudent behavior.

But I'm an engineer, not a diplomat, so I challenge them for a sample of a filter.  They respond that they can't provide one.  Then I ask for s-parameter data.  They explain that the supplier went out of business, so their website is down, and the data is no longer available.  Finally, I've reached the limit of my patience and tell them that it will take at least three months to implement, a ridiculously long time for a circuit as simple as that.  I can tell from their expressions that they correctly interpret my response as "fuck you."  (And I didn't even tell them how expensive it would be.)