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Young Master Dallas' trumpet had some little thing wrong with it. The place we rented it from was closed, so I took it to a different place. We ended up parking next to some kind of hospital or nursing home, and as the kids and I got out of the car, we could see rows and rows of ancient people lying in their hospitals beds.
Once we were in the shop, we noticed that the owner not only repaired trumpets, he also sold a number of items. In particular he carried the widest range of coffeemakers I've ever seen. I was browsing the stock just to kill time while he was fixing the trumpet. As I worked my way further and further to the back of the store, I found myself in the student lounge of a performing arts college. All the students hanging out there were preparing for one or more operas or musicals. I sat down and listened and, occasionally, joined the conversation.
At some point I heard a small scrap of gossip that alerted me that an employee from my office had been carrying on a long, drawn-out email correspondence with a programmer from one of our database contractors. I saw a xerox of some of their exchange, and it was clear the employee was making plans to hijack the database.
At this I realized that it would be necessary to a) stomp on the rumor that this was happening and b) officially notify the database company that NOBODY was alloweed access to any root or supervisor passwords except me. I spent the next few hours running around and trying to accomplish this.
Meanwhile I also learned that one of the men at the college was married to a woman where I work. At some point (details vague) this relationship ended up with me and a couple other people doing a cross-institutional focus group to talk about some administrative issues. When I was done with this, I was seriously considering the purchase of an all-glass cone type drip coffee maker, if the trumpet ever finally got fixed.
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