I’m sitting at a shared work station trying to figure out a confusing piece of code written by a co-worker. I had rolled my chair over from my desk and was sitting off to the right of the empty main chair baffled by this horrible code I was trying to maintain. My supervisor rolls his chair over to the other side of the station and we are both getting rather frustrated.
Finally we hollar for Jenni since she is the one who is supposed to be working on this in the first place. She sits between us as Jeff and I continue intently focusing on the code on the screen. The piece of code we are looking at starts to make sense, and we watch as it untangles and the problem we were having is fixed. It gets sorted out and Jeff and I are anylizing it and discussing it. We look towards eachother to congratulate Jenni on fixing the problem, but the middle chair is empty. We look over towards her desk a few feet away, but it’s empty and her computer is off.
“Oh yeah, she’s supposed to be out today” Jeff says, “Lucky we caught her before she ran out.”
“Wait, why was she even here?” I asked.
“Yeah, I don’t know. She got out of here real quick too…”
A few hours later Jenni calls to check in, and Jeff thanks her for helping us with the problem we had earlier. She gets confused and says she’s been out of town since the night before, so she hasn’t been at work all day.
Jeff and I are baffled. We puzzle over the problem for a while before realizing that we imagined that Jenni had been there, when in reality we were so focused on the problem, and so in-sync as a team that our subconcious tricked us into thinking Jenni was there, and taking over our movements. I had been controlling the mouse with my right hand and typing in the right handed keyboard position with my left hand, while he typed in the left handed keyboard position with his right hand. The only way this was possible was by our brains telling us that Jenni was there and that she was the one doing the typing, when really we were typing concertedly. I’d heard about this happening with siamese twins (being able to each type on one half of the keyboard, and even though they can’t talk through their minds, they know eachother so well they know the letter they are supposed to type next). We laughed about this, but were utterly shocked that we were able to pull it off. We must make up a really really good team. We marveled that we could even type on the wrong handed position on the keyboard. How the heck did I hit “enter”? My left thumb? How did we decide who hit “space”? The whole thing was kind of scary actually, and our laughter was more nervous than anything.
The wedding was starting outside, and the barn we were sitting in was getting hot. The hay on the floor was dirty and smelly and making me sneeze and I was tired of working on this old computer in the middle of the rotting floor anyways, especially since they took our desks away and left only the empty chair Jenni’s ghost had been in.
Jeff was urgently talking to Jenni on the phone about whatever the newest problem was. I was confused about why I was wandering aimlessly around the barn, trying to avoid the giant holes in the floor, and why there were giant chucky-cheese style posters of all of my co-worker’s faces on the walls with huge cheesy grins. I decided I should probably rejoin the wedding party who were now following the limo along the dirt path, and the band was about half way through the dirge. I was amazed the bride’s dress wasn’t getting dirty as she walked along mournfully with her head bowed in reverence next to the groom as the limo carried the body to… wait, what the heck??? Dangit! This is a dream…
