awakeI was at a pool with hoppie and Janice when these two middle-eastern guys came up to me and said they were joining a channel (DALnet), and couldn't keep ops and it told them to talk to me. Well, I recognized that they were trying to join #growl, which is my channel (or was when I used to use DALnet ages ago), and that I must have set secure-ops on at some point (which is very unlike me...I'm normally of the opinion that as long as I'm not using it, anyone can use my channel. (and until I was an op, I felt the same way about my nickname, which I didn't secure until I was asked to because people were deliberately spoofing me. Whole different story. Not relevent except to speak to state of surprise.), but I figured I'd screwed it up at some point, so I got into my car and drove to the #growl overpass (?) and tried to park long enough to be able to fix the chan-serv thing, but the traffic was way too heavy and I was pretty much in the way wherever I was, there was no good "side of the road" to stop on, so I ended up going back to the pool and trying to reset from there. ('cause truth be told, you don't have to be on the channel to change the mode settings with chanserv.) So I'm trying to identify to nickserv using my cellphone, and hoppie is laughing at me.
"What?" I say. "I can't use my Palm, no wireless and those are pretty much my only options."
He says, "This is DALnet pool, of course they're going to have access mechanism. Use that!" and he points to a soda machine. I dutifully go over and try to use it and fail miserably, then come back.
Mikki (Watchman), has joined hoppie and Janice at this point and I explain that the Coke machine is just a Coke machine. Now hoppie and Mikki both laugh at me. (grump). Hoppie hands me a 5$ and send me back. Now the Coke machine is a jukebox, while I'm looking at it, Mikki and hoppie come up. Hoppie puts the money in the machine, because it's 5 cents per transaction, and Mikki quickly presses the change return which shoots 5$ worth of assorted coins out the left side of the machine where no one is standing. After the initial shock, "Mikki! Tell me before you do that next time." I get most of the coins and start picking up the strays. Then Mikki shows me how to program the jukebox for nick and chanserv commands.
Then I ask about the cabana that the vending machines are leaning against. "Oh, yeah," says Mikki, "That's for opers, we can get in."
So we go in. There's a sun porch, then a rec room, and then beyond that, a sort of party room and then there's an upstairs. We go into the rec room and are sitting around watching TV gabbing, and people keep trying to come in seeing us in. One guy gets in and tells us we should let him stay because he's David Hasselhoff's prompter. Well, we don't consider that good enough, and we send him off and pull the steel mesh reinforced door guards over the sun porch doors so they can't see anyone in there anymore.
Then somehow David (Hasselhoff) and his prompter sneak back in. We explain that we're not really sure we're supposed to be here, so we're not going in and we're not going to, as he suggests, throw a massive party. We kick them out again. Then we hear noises upstairs. We hadn't actually planned on going upstairs, (for reasons already pretty much stated), but we feel obligated to check out the noise. We climb these stairs and they go on forever and they're more like scaffolding stairs. At some point, even though I'm aware that I'm dreaming and shouldn't be afraid of heights, I go into heightened terror, and I cling to bannister, close my eyes and pretend that I don't exist, frozen with fear. After everyone else goes downstairs, David and and the prompter sneak in and find me there. David tells the prompter to pull me off and ride me (seriously) downstairs. The next thing I know is that I'm lying in a curled ball on the floor of the upstairs room, shaking.
And then I woke up.