dream Dream: Monday 10 August 2015 07:45

Funeral Music License

Tags: Atta Rehman

I am with a group of friends, although they are not people that I know in real life. I think there might be one other male in the group, but the rest are females, and one of them in particular bares a striking resemblance to "Thirteen" from House.

We are out somewhere, in a city, and we spend most of the day hanging out and going shopping. After doing this for a couple of hours, we decide it's time to do what we got together for, which is to get a license to play music at the funeral of one of our friends that died recently.

We go to some kind of government building, and there is a massive queue of people. We join the back of the queue, and the we realise that everyone's queuing to be allowed through a doorway and into another section of the building, where there is another queue. We were queuing to queue!

After a short while we reach the front of the first queue, and then are split into different queues inside. The whole process seems unnecessarily complicated, and surprisingly we are at the front of the queue in no time and heading into an office.

We are split up and interviewed separately. When I go in, the guy who's interviewing me is in his 40s. He starts by asking me why I want the license, so I tell him that I want to play at my friend's funeral, and he asks which instrument I want to play and I tell him that I'm going to play the clarinet. He asks a couple of other questions, and then tells me that I qualify for the license, and all I have to do is pay the licensing fee.

He takes my credit card and slots it into a machine, and then asks me to enter my pin, but the keypad is really strange. It has loads of buttons on it, including all of the letters of the alphabet, but is not laid out like a normal computer keyboard: the keys are not square and are arranged in a series of intersecting circles. The whole keypad is made out of brushed metal and is tricky to use.

I look at the keypad, and after a few seconds I find the part with the numbers. It's similar to the numerical pad on a standard keyboard, but all of the keys are arranged in two concentric circles. I hesitate for a few seconds while I try to remember my pin number.

"Come on, you've taken up enough of my time and are holding up the queue!" the man says to me angrily in a raised voice.

I get really angry at him and basically tell him that if he wants people to be able to enter their pin numbers quickly, he should get a standards keypad!

I eventually manage to enter my pin, and take my card and go outside where the others are waiting. I explain what happened inside, and how I found it surprisingly hard to enter my pin because I don't really know the number, but have memorised the positions of the keys on the pad.

A little while later, I bump into Atta who used to work with me at WorldPay. He moves me away from the rest of the group, and in a quite voice asks me if I can lend him 100 dollars to buy a new mattress. The then explains to me that he wouldn't be able to pay me back immediately, but would pay in instalments over the next few months.

The last thing I remember is thinking that he couldn't be doing to well now that he's started work as a contractor!


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