Nightmare of Ambush Canyon

Preface:

While working for Siemens Business Services, I experienced a recurring nightmare about the phone setup. Don't get me wrong... I loved the clients, the coworkers, even the managers were cool. But something was sending me into panic attacks, even though I didn't recognize the symptoms such as my voice loss. The greatest stress came from the way they wired the phones: We agents had to wear our headsets at all times because at any moment, we could be automatically dropped into a call without any control over when it starts.

That "random ambush" was very key in triggering my anxiety and excessive expectations. The tone would trigger a Pavlovian kind of response to start me sweating and riding that adrenaline. In fact, things quickly got bad enough I was having a recurring nightmare that is worthy of those IBM commercials where the Psychiatrist is saying, "tell me about your dream..." It's "The Nightmare of Ambush Canyon."

Begin IBM commercial:
"Tell me about your dream..."

I was in the old west. On horseback. I was a cowboy, riding into a canyon.

"Go on..."

There are these callers, and they're gunnin' for me. I don't know who, I don't know where, and I don't know when they'll strike... All I know is that I'm their target.

Suddenly, the shot rings out, and I'm struck in the chest with hot led. And I'm falling, off of the back of my horse, falling toward the ground...

...ONTO THE BACK of... another horse! It's my technical skills and courtesy there to catch me... and carry me wounded to the end of the canyon...

...only to enter straight into the next canyon, identical canyon... FIFTY - TIMES - A - DAY.

"When you need answers, buy IBM business products, blah blah blah..."

The camera cuts to the cowboy taking a long drag off his cigarette, and expelling smoke from hundreds of bullet holes. No, wait, I don't smoke... The cowboy sits down for the night to pull off his boots. He pours out twenty pounds of buck shot into a bucket on the floor.


"Well, that's our show, thanks for watching. If you'll excuse me, I've got some Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to administer to my Socially Anxious self. SEE YA!"

sincerely,
Joel 'Twisty' Nye, The OTHER Science Guy.