At the Time

If only I’d known at the time, which – with time these days being the way it is these days – was certainly possible, if not likely. However, with the new modern hand-held time machine taking over as the gadget of choice, supplanting the mere smartphone, we can see more and more of the problems it was intended to solve actually getting worse and worse. People are spending so much time leaping backwards and forwards in time, mostly to remind themselves to do things they forgot to do first time, or sometimes to stop themselves from what they did first time, that they have hardly any time left for the present.

When you do have the time to go out, you find everyone standing around – gadget in hand – searching for that point in their personal time stream where they can go back and change whatever it was they did wrong that enabled them to end up here and – more often than not – getting in your way as you yourself scroll back through this morning looking for the point where you can jump back to a point where you won’t be late for work because you spent most of the time, since getting out of bed, trying to find that point in last night’s argument that you spent the whole of the night sleeplessly thinking up some devastating put-down for.

Although, the last time you were late for work you found no-one there as they’d all gone back to the previous evening’s TV schedule to re-watch a crucial scene from the latest reality time-travel drama they’d all missed because they’d spent too long in the pub after work yesterday.