Restaurant accounts recievable FM broadcast recording band

I dreamed I was working for a restaurant in Paradise. One of the Cozy Diner franchise, but not exactly one I remembered precisely, but of that ilk. There were big Mexican mob bosses who raked in the money, but the day to day was left to a mix of immigrants and plain old white folks who performed the kitchen and accounts receivable functions. 

I started out as a very lowly trash boy, and was expected to provide my own makeshift uniform. I asked if my oil stained blue jeans would be ok, and if I should invest in a white button down shirt. They laughed at the idea of a trash boy needing to have a button down shirt and we settled on a clean white cotton t-shirt to complete my outfit. 

I got to work, following the staff around and keeping busy with learning whatever it was they were going to teach me. Soon I was doing a little accounts receivable, contacting customers who were overdue and threatening to cut off their credit or suspend services. 

I noticed that their records were documented in a terribly unorganized fashion. The ledger was a simple piece of old paper, folded and scribbled on in pencil with only the dates of the phone calls and no real information like, who, what or how much, the typical things that should be on a balance sheet. I made mention of that to Kay, the receptionist. 

The part of Kay was played by Kay Doering, an actual receptionist that I worked with at Hondo Die Supply, back in LA in the '80s. 

Fun fact, Kay actually found a way to embezzle a large sum of money from clients by eliciting cash payments from customers for a reduction in their total bill. She managed to net about $5000, so she must have had a pretty good technique. She didn't do a good enough job covering her tracks, though, and the discrepancy was caught by the office manager, who then took it to the owner of the company, John Hitzler. 

Instead of firing her, Mr. Hitzler (I just love saying that name) made a deal with her to have her work off her debt by garnishing her incredibly small paycheck, so she'd work for even less than her already unsatisfactory slave wages. 

She endured this way for the rest of the time I worked there, in a perpetual state of forced gratitude and sorrowful defeat. She was whipped and she knew it. She became an automaton, like post-lobotomy Murphy in "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest,"  or Winston in 1984, after his capture and re-education in the dreaded Room 104. 

Back to my dream. I was assisting Kay in trying to nail down some of the more delinquent clients and somehow I became aware of another system in place, one of recording phone calls. There was an extensive library of old cassettes, again, disorganized and disheveled. Some of the tapes were coming out of their cartridges, in a tangle of spagetti-like magnetic ribbon. 

I set about to fixing some with the good old "cut and splice" method, using scissors and scotch tape. I assured them that I was an expert at this, but that some of the recording would be lost. But prior to showing off my editing wizardry, I discovered that there was an FM transmitter linking the part of the restaurant dedicated to accounting to a breakroom/storage area in a building across the street. 

Someone had brought in some musical instruments and there was an impromptu kind of jam session, with myself on guitar, kind of hamming it up on the open mic. I was doing my Mark and Brian morning show impersonation, fueled by ego and caffeine. I was loving it. My guitar licks were awesome. 

Rick Johnson, my former Malicious Mischief bandmate was there. We were trying to work through "Grimsley's Theme," a song we composed using lyrics provided by the actual host of the show, Robert Foster, which I acquired as a member of the Grimsley fan club. (That part really happened. No lie. I have a tape from a party that we played in Garden Grove and it is actually not too.... well, I like it anyways.)

As we were "performing" this jam session over the transmitter for the entertainment of the accounts receivable staff across the street, it occurred to me that I should disclose this fact to my bandmates, who at this point were Rick Johnson, Jerry O'Connell and one of the Mexicans on the wait staff. 

They were ok with the idea, but quickly became more mindful of what we said over the intercom. No loose banter about the big bosses, since they might be listening in. I knew Kay would get a kick out of it, though, so we tried to keep it loose and not appear too stifled. 

 That's about it. I awoke to a bright patch of sunlight on the wall which nearly blinded me. I still had some antibiotic ointment on my eyes from a prescription for my stye. It made the sunlit patch very distorted, like looking at the sun from underwater. I wiped away some of the excess, enough to clear a patch to look through, and here I am. 

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I put the brakes on the whole Lesa thing yesterday. Again. Things were progressing down a familiar path with her, to my dissatisfaction. I called her attention to the fact that she still had a boyfriend, to my knowledge, and that I wasn't going to be doing any more flirting with her as long as this was the case. 

As usual, it was me asking a direct question and her skirting the issue with a long, detailed story but no simple answers. I had to infer the relationship status from the lengthy narrative. 

There is no way to have a conversation with her, since when I ask a question, I get a text which took her 2 hours to compose, and which would require me to ask a follow up question for clarification. This is tedious and very frustrating. Like trying to pull teeth with tweezers, I just can't get a grip. She gets weary, and I get frustrated, and then no one's happy. I told her we can just be friends. It's for the best.