Regular readers of this blog will no doubt recall that I have zombie dreams quite regularly. It used to be that they could be called 'alarmingly regular' but they're no longer that regular or, to be honest, that alarming. I did have a slightly different kind last night, though...
Initially, it seemed like the standard tale of survival in a zombie apocalypse. I was part of a small group of people making their way through the corridors of a large building (school? office? shopping mall? can't be sure as we spent most of this dream edging through a single corridor). We reached the end of a corridor, at which there was a staircase up to the next floor, and a door in one side wall to another area... there also seemed to be some kind of balcony area high up on the end wall. Lurking near the staircase were a few zombies - one adult, two very young children. The adult should have been easy enough to pick off as it wasn't moving a great deal. The trouble was getting a clear shot around the staircase. In the end, one of my team and I went round either side of the staircase to find a decent vantage point. Unfortunately, as soon as my team-mate killed the adult, the two children became more aggressive and animated, bouncing around everywhere, hiding, and generally making themselves a nuisance. I'm not entirely sure I remember this part of the dream accurately, but I think one of them ended up getting thrown out of a window, while the other was despatched by another member of the team, hanging behind us.
Once we were sure that all the zombies in that area were dead, we regrouped and checked that no-one had been injured. At this point, a guy wearing a blindfold and with his arms bound to his sides stumbled through the door. One of the people stood behind me, understandably jumpy, took the 'shoot first, ask questions later' approach to the situation, and the guy flew back through the doorway with a large hole in his chest. Some noise drew our attention to the balconies above us, and another couple of people - very obviously not zombies - were standing some way above us.
Now, either my recollection of the dream is faulty, or we seemed to find ourselves on the roof of the building, with no discernible transition. The two we'd seen on the balcony were there, along with a whole group of other survivors. They proceeded to tell us how they weren't remotely worried by zombies, and something started to seem a little odd about them... They were far too jovial, coming just that little bit too close for comfort, and weren't reacting to the presence of additional survivors the way we might have expected... And they soon revealed why that was.
They were all vampires.
Weirdly, a member of my team - who looked not dissimilar to Andrew Lincoln's Rick Grimes from The Walking Dead - expressed a certain disbelief in the existence of vampires. Weirder still, these 'vampires' seemed to all have metal teeth... or, at least, shaped metal plates - random, viciously jagged, asymmetrical panels - held in front of their actual teeth. My last memory of this dream before waking up was of blood splattering on the face of the 'vampire' stood in front of me as the guy to my left was attacked.
Part of me is wondering if even my dreams are now suffering from Zombie Fatigue... I could certainly handle a change to vampires. They can be far more interesting.
Following on from this variation on a theme, I've had another at work. It's always been the case that people I work with feel as though I never make mistakes. The truth of it is that I usually spot my own errors before anyone else and correct them before they become a problem. Usually, the first thing anyone else knows about my mistakes is when I'm telling them "Yeah, that happened, but it's fixed now."
Of course, Murphy's Law tends to suggests that it won't always go that way... even though I've never had much use for Murphy's Law because I can normally work around it. I know what to expect, so there's usually a backup plan ready to go in advance. And so, when I accepted a full-time position at a small publishing company, having worked there for a few weeks earlier in the year, I felt that I knew what to expect, and had my contingencies arranged.
Yet my very first magazine went terribly wrong, and I didn't even notice... I output my final pages the same way I've always done, the way I'd done them the last time I was there. What could possibly go wrong? In fact, I only realised something was adrift while uploading pages of my second magazine to the Printers. Literally every one of my pages had the same low-res/RGB error. I couldn't figure out how or why, nor could I spare the time for any research. I simply had to re-do all of my pages and resupply them. Sorting out what had gone wrong, where it had gone wrong and why it had gone wrong would have to wait.
And it's actually still a bit of a puzzler. My PDFs somehow came out low-res and RGB, when the settings I used (the company's own standard output settings) were for high-resolution CMYK output, and I can find no satisfactory explanation for that. Initially, I thought my settings had somehow been ignored, but even when I made the company's settings the output default, the same issue occurred. I'm not inclined to shrug and blame the computer or the software, so I'm currently in a bit of a self-recrimination kick.
The worst part of it was, having admitted to the salesperson that the ads pages were not of optimal quality, and that the problem hadn't been picked up on until after her magazine went to press, the MD called me for a quick meeting... In a nearby wine bar.
I knew what it was about from the moment he asked to speak to me, not least because he popped down only a few minutes after my admission to the salesperson. How could it possibly be about anything else? He nevertheless started off with a very long preamble about his management style and his lack of technical knowledge about Production process. He kept assuring me that everything was OK and that they'd be able to smooth over any client's ruffled feathers and that, essentially, shit happens.
I'm kind of not used to that for two reasons. I've always been one to admit my errors because, while they're rare these days, they are a learning experience (I lost count, years ago, of the number of times one of my mistakes has revealed potentially huge problems which were then avoided by a change in procedure). Also, with most of my managers, I've found it better to 'fess up and face the music than to deny that any problems have occurred. If I get a bollocking, so be it.
So, weirdly, the fact that I didn't get a bollocking for fucking up my first magazine kinda left me shellshocked over the weekend. It's actually still weighing on my mind, which is why I spent part of this evening experimenting. I brought the relevant files home with me and remade the PDF - by the same method - only to find it worked as it should have done... so I'm still none the wiser, and my self-recrimination kick looks set to continue for a while because I still don't want to just shrug and blame the computer or the software.
I'd explained the problem as best I could to the MD, told him that I own my mistakes and that it was entirely my fault because I didn't check my output before sending it to the Printers, but that I'd done everything I normally would in those situations, so I didn't understand why it had gone wrong. I also told him that, once I discovered the problem, I was able to correct it simply by dealing with the final output in a different way, so all my output since has been rock solid.
It was comforting to find that my MD shares my loathing for people who say such things as "I don't know what the problem is, but I can tell you it wasn't my fault!"
It's not really comforting to find that, whatever the problem was, it is specific to my work machine after all...
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