What could be more interesting than corporate restructuring? How ’bout other people’s dreams? Okay, how ’bout other people’s dreams about corporate restructuring? Hang on for an incredibly boring ride, ’cause this morning I awoke from a Google stress dream, about moving into the Google offices and adjusting to the Google laptops.
The Google offices were in a gigantic, cavernous version of my parents’ living room in California, with the burnt-sienna shag carpeting and the dark-brown wood. On the wall were a (fictional) pair of my father’s paintings, two additional pieces from his beach negative series: one of my mother, in a somewhat different pose than in the existing painting, and one of the Beatles. There were also very large Chinese vases arrayed on ledges up by the roof, and I found myself wondering whether I could ever claim them now that the house had been sold to Google, or whether Google got ownership of any items left inside.
The laptops involved multiple oddly shaped screens that you pulled out of the top, and they were floppy, so that to get them to stand up you had to attach various straps and kind of jury-rig the whole shebang.
There was then a debate over whether we should sit on the floor or at tables. “Why does everyone think we have to be like DreamWorks?” someone asked (apparently in my dreams the DreamWorks people sit on the floor). “Well,” I suggested, “it’s also all the Indian decor in here.” Then I worried that I had somehow insulted our Indian engineers.
In the end it was decided that we would sit at the tables, which somehow made our laptops normal again. Then I woke up.