This is a true story, albeit remembered through the filter of passing time, from the late 1990s.
At the time, I was an IT employee working at a major automotive manufacturer, and had some responsibility for the software that controlled one of their more complex conveyor systems.
Normally, it just ran, but when it went stupid there a lot of people were sitting there twiddling their thumbs waiting for work to do. Management had decided that was not a good thing, so they insisted that someone be physically out there every production hour in order to quickly deal with any problems that might arise.
This was the kind of duty that can be described as "six months of boredom, punctuated by 6 minutes of stark raving terror." No one was shooting at you if the system was down, but losing 20 minutes of production would exceed my annual salary.
I was at home, one morning, when I was awoken by the phone ringing. I came to enough to get that noisy thing to stop making that annoying noise, and apparently was coherent enough to mumble, "heh low?"
On the other end of the line was the guy covering the early morning "on-site" duty for the day. In the back of my mind, I knew that he would not call me at home unless it was really bad. He has asked me some question, and I apparently responded.
My brain finally engaged and I woke up. I knew that I was on the phone with the guy that was covering, but not much else. Before I had a chance to ask him to repeat the question, I heard the people on the other end of the phone all start cheering. Tom popped back on the call and said, "that worked! We're back up! Thanks!"
I responded with, "uh, okay. Write down what I told you to do, because I have no memory of what I said. What was going on, again?"
So maybe I was not completely asleep, but my conscious mind had not taken over, yet. My subconscious had jumped in and suggested two actions to take, which worked. After he described it to me, I realized that my conscious mind would have tried different steps instead.
So, yeah ... solving problems while coming to from a dream state. Sounds like "doing my job in my sleep" to me! |
