Elevator to the Brownies

MORNING OF MAY 21, 2008

I was in an elevator going up. There were two overweight young women in the compartment with me. One of them seemed perfectly nice and normal, even familiar, to me (though I'm fairly sure she was fictional), while the other was particularly annoying and unattractive.

We exited the elevator into a room that looked like some sort of empty office. There were windows that looked out over a city skyline on a pretty day. We were obviously on a very high floor. Suddenly I saw an arrangement of brownies and Christmas cookies that I somehow knew had been prepared by one of my bosses at work.

Next thing I remember my bosses (a couple) and the other very few employees I work with (as well as some past employees I no longer work with) were in the room. My boss asked me to call Olive Garden and make reservations for all of us to eat lunch there later.

The "telephone" was a very strange, complicated contraption sitting on a nearby desk. It was covered in flashing lights, buttons, coiled wiring, etc. There was an elderly man in coveralls who tried to explain to me how to use it. There was some convoluted series of actions you had to take which would make several of the colored lights come on in a specific order, and then you'd have successfully placed a call to your intended party.

I tried the process, but every time I'd get about halfway through it, someone would come up to me and tell me something or ask me something, and I'd lose my train of thought and have to start over in exasperation.

Then I was distracted by the more annoying of the two overweight girls from the elevator. She had some kind of small bruise on her arm, and she was being very dramatic about it to everyone. She was crying and claiming she'd been injured in the elevator, and she was going to sue. Everyone including myself was baffled that she'd carry on so over such a small bruise. Somehow people expected me to go and calm her down. I didn't want to. I didn't know her, and I thought she was only seeking attention, which I didn't want to reward with just that. And yet it seems like I did go and say something calm to her, but my memory is vague.

Now my boss told me to hand out the brownies and Christmas cookies to everyone there. I went over to the place where I'd seen them before to find most of them were now gone and the ones that remained were partially eaten.

Suddenly I noticed the room we'd been in this whole time looked like a department store. The bag the brownies had been in was sitting on top of a shelf of folded T-shirts.