I had to dig up this thread because I had another one of these weird golf nightmares a couple nights ago that I thought was kind of funny. In this one I think I was trying to make some sort of high school or college team, and playing a course I hadn't seen before when I also hadn't played for a while (this season I only played about 15 or 20 times, that may have been where that feeling came from)
The hole I remember had me teeing off from the top of a table, through a doorway about 10 or 15 feet ahead. Beyond the doorway was a covered patio and beyond that the fairway started. But this was just the beginning of the problems on this tee shot... Straight down the fairway were a few trees, and when I looked more closely I found that short of those tees the fairway had a strong dogleg left. I asked one of the guys I was playing with how far away the trees were and he said they were 250 yards, but I recall that to me I thought they looked more like 200 yards. But I couldn't lay up short of the tees because a tee shot with any loft at all wouldn't clear under the top of the doorway.
Even worse, on the patio to the left of the doorway was a bar at which many people were seated, so you couldn't cut the corner on the dogleg without worrying about hitting someone in the head. So I decided I'd try to hit a big hook, and if I missed it straight it'd go over those trees I saw and I hoped it would be OK since I didn't know what was back there. I got up on the table to tee my ball, and for whatever reason it was pretty easy to get the tee in there. I teed it up but found I was not facing properly through the doorway, if I went through the doorway I was aiming at people sitting at the bar. So I had to move the very edge of the table, so my heels were hanging off the edge, in order to get aimed straight down the fairway, so I reteed there. Oh yeah, the table had a tablecloth on it, so it was kind of slippery (besides standing on a table with my heels hanging over the edge hitting through a doorway beyond which people were sitting at a bar to a dogleg with a very short turning point) I managed to swing at it and made pretty bad contact and heeled into the trim to the left of the doorway and it richoceted off back and to the right down a small hallway where it rattled around and settled. I went back to check out that shot and saw I had a whole mess of tables, chairs and people to avoid just to get it in front of the doorway from which I could play my next shot so I said something like "this is f---ing ridiculous, I'm just going to skip this hole!" and picked up my ball.
As I picked up my ball, under my breath I told myself (and I'm dead serious about this!) that I was going to post a thread on GCA about this course, because a course that had not one but two holes where you teed off from a tabletop was really crappy architecture!