I had a dream a young lady in a black wig came into my place of work.  This was Jenny McCarthy, younger than she would be in real life, fallen on hard times that she will never experience in real life.  She was reporting income from a singing gig at a strip club, because she was receiving a need-based social benefit with eligibility tightly linked to those numbers.

As I was trying to get access to her benefit record for the purpose of placing this work report, her social security number was showing on two lines, where one had to zigzag between them to get the sequence, and each zero was replaced with an ascii character of a double zero.  Do those even exist?  She was sitting right next to me and I had to dissuade her from looking at the screen while I sorted this out.  I told her that normally she’d be on the other side of the counter, please don’t read this stuff.

Somehow that changed in the course of the conversation to where I was willing to let her sign into gmail on my computer, to download her pay stub.  It was a pdf full of hyperlinked images, looking like a porn site.  I was trying to understand which number represented her gross income and accidentally touched one of those links, forcing me to close my browser immediately before the malware could load.  Then I had to get back in and start over from scratch.

In waking life, I’m under pressure at work to not use the hold button.  I just try to do my inputs quietly while people yak at me.  She said she wanted to regale me with an original song about trans rights, and launched into it.  I had to ask her to be quiet twice, while nearby coworkers were on phone calls.

She started playing with one of those coworker’s hair, like a stripper might do to somebody during a lap dance.  Then Patrick Stewart came, in character as her strip club manager, in a black toupee of his own, tousling her wig hair.  I got that he was playing a character even tho I didn’t feel the same about her, and wondered why he was still doing shitty parts when he could have retired long ago.

I finished my work, she was gone, and I wanted to tell a coworker about it, enough that I violated a privacy policy to do so.  Then I noticed Jim Carrey sitting on floor, leaning against a pillar, and thought, shit, ex-boyfriends are a category of people we particularly do not want to disclose information to.  I hoped he hadn’t heard me.  Ho-hum, I woke up.

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