Furbies, lifelines, and anchors.

I swear there's a point here. A good one.

OK, I’m going to really let you inside my head today. Like, really. I hope you stick around after this.

Last night, I slept horribly. It started because I had a dream my wife passed away. Not surprisingly, I woke up in a panic. Still half asleep, I even emailed our insurance guy in the wee hours of the morning because I vaguely remembered there was a problem with the recent payment for my wife’s life insurance policy.

I tossed and turned for an hour before finally getting back to sleep. And once I did, I had another dream. A strange dream. And I’m going to tell you that dream in detail because, believe it or not, there’s actually a lesson there.

This is about to get really weird. You’ve been warned.

The dream started out with me being employed somewhere where I was working in a cubicle. (Think Severance, if you watch that show.) My co-worker and the tech support guru was the former assistant principal from my elementary school, Barb. She hadn’t aged a day. (I told you this was weird.)

Barb was helping me because a new mandate had come down to upgrade our computers. When I did, a printer above me (a regular printer, not a 3D printer mind you) produced around 600 floppy disks. Remember those? Some were the size of a saltine cracker, others were normal sized. But here’s the thing: Once you inserted one of the floppy disks into your computer the printer then produced tiny 3D figurines that were smaller versions of the old Furbies. Remember Furbies?

I swear this is going somewhere. Please hang with me.

An actual Furby.

Once the Furby was complete, I noticed each little toy creature had something printed on the back. Not a name, but a phrase. For example, one was “Joy to the world.” Why? Because, of course, Barb told me that our bosses were requiring us to drive around the city and find a corresponding drop-off zone (for example, the “Joy to the world” drop-off zone) and place our Furby inside the appropriate bin.

Why did we have to do that? From what I could gather, it was a marketing ploy from the Furby manufacturer. The company I was working for was getting paid by the toy company to make us do this to drum up interest and attention for their product.

You can’t make this up.

OK, so I promised a point. Now we’re getting there.

After driving around trying to match each printed Furby with its drop zone, I was fed up. Frustrated. “This is so stupid! Why are we doing this?!”

That’s when someone showed me a news article: One of the news organizations I used to work for had just gotten an infusion of cash; they were rebranding and coming back bigger and better. A “2.0” version, so to speak. And they were getting the band back together. All of us, including me.

“Yes! I’m rescued from this stupid place that makes me drive around with Furbies!”

Maybe you think at this point I’m going to say the lesson is that God comes through, that he rescues us from our “Furby jobs.” Right? I’m sorry, but no. That wasn’t the lesson at all. In fact, the lesson is way more difficult than that. And I think it’s way more…important?

Here’s the lesson: