Welcome to the World of Tomorrow

Today is National Muffin Day in Brazil, but it's December, and I've already settled into holiday mode, so I can't even be bothered making muffins right now. Instead, you get another nice and short post - to make up for the gigantic wall of text I wrote yesterday.

To further continue the impression that I don't do anything at work, my latest little project has been sending emails from one of my co-workers to himself.... from the future. I don't take credit for this one, I stole the idea from The Office (US version), in a prank where Jim sends Dwight faxes from "Future Dwight". When one of my co-workers, who I'll also call Dwight, leaves his computer unattended and unlocked, I quickly type an email to him, from him. Not a big deal, but then I discovered an option that allows you to send an email after a certain delay.

Ever since I discovered it, I've been waiting for him to leave his computer unattended, but he has been really good about it recently, much to my frustration. I finally had the chance today!

I told Jal about this whole plan, and we started talking about what would make a "Future Me" email believable. He said that he has a secret passphrase that only he knows, and so future him would also know it. If he ever had to verify himself to himself, that's what he'd do. Obviously, I can't do that with Dwight, because in the unlikely chance that he has set up a passphrase for himself, I won't be able to find out what it is.

We decided that the next best thing would be to mention recent events. It is something that other people on the team would know about, but short of getting him crazily drunk (unethical), that's the best that I'll be able to do.

I composed a short email:

Hi Dwight, 

It's me again, Future Dwight. We've had a rough couple of months working on project, but we made it through. 

I just wanted to remind you that you're an amazing person. 

From,
Future Dwight

And set it to send while we were both due to be in a meeting, so I would have plausible deniability.

It wouldn't be a Fodder prank if something didn't go wrong - and something did go wrong. The meeting we were in was due to run for an hour. So I set the timer to send the email 10 minutes before the end of the meeting. We finished discussing everything we needed to discuss in 30 minutes (it's a Christmas miracle), and everyone started to prepare to go back to work. I briefly toyed with the idea of dragging out the meeting for another 20 minutes, but that would be both unethical (wasting our employer's money) and irresponsible (I have stuff that I need to finish (see? I actually do work at the office!).

At the time the email was due to be sent, I was at my desk. Dwight replied to me saying:

Thank you for the kind words.

I asked him how he knew it was me, and he said it was too positive to be anyone else. I tried to feign ignorance without actually lying, but he wasn't fooled. He added that if he had somehow developed the power to travel through time, the last thing he'd do would be to send emails to himself. And if he did, it would probably include the next day's lotto numbers or something helpful like that. I pointed out that as a responsible time traveller, he would want to have as little impact on the timeline as possible. So maybe sending inane emails was all Future Dwight was allowed to do.

Jal countered saying that even sending an email trying to cheer himself up would alter the timeline, which is a good point. But maybe Future Dwight was given the chance to perform one small act and after thinking it through, he pinpoints one moment in his life where things started to go downhill. If only he knew that it's all uphill from then, he wouldn't have made such bad decisions.

It reminds me of a short story by Isaac Asimov: Spell My Name with an S. (Spoilers ahead)

A physicist is told that he should change his name from Zebatinsky to Sebatinsky. This triggers a whole heap of events, resulting in the prevention of nuclear war. At the end of the story, we find out that the entire sequence of events was due to a bet between two aliens, one of whom claims he's able to make a large scale change (prevent nuclear war) with a tiny stimulus (changing one person's name to be spelled with an S instead of a Z).