Nightmares in Helvetica

A lot of people dream about their jobs, according to an unsurprising survey conducted by Staples. (Click here for psychoblather about the topic.) I can't imagine how anyone could avoid dreaming about his or her job. I dream about pretty much anything that I spent more than 20 minutes doing the previous day. This means that I have a lot of nocturnal thoughts about riding trains that may not have anything to do with sex. (Sometimes a tunnel is just a tunnel.) And if I scrub my kitchen sink during the day, I'm sure to have thoughts involving rubber gloves and Comet that night. More common are my dreams of Excel spreadsheets, coming after a day of entering data at work. And then there is my recurring dream in which the magazine that I co-edit comes back from the printer riddled with typographical errors: misspellings, missing punctuation, and more widows and orphans than the complete works of Dickens. Sometimes my dream self will foolishly hope that no one notices the awful carnage, but even then I'm gripped by the fear of discovery. Is this how Tony Soprano spends his nights? PS: Journalism fans should be sure to catch the last season of The Wire, now running on HBO. In one episode, the city editor of the Baltimore Sun wakes up in the middle of the night, suddenly fearful that he transposed some numbers in a story about shipping traffic in the city's harbor. (As it turns out, he hadn't made any mistakes.) Welcome to my nightmare!