2001-07-19 - 11:21 p.m.

I was thinking this morning as I got ready for work, that time travel might not be as bad as every writer/philosopher who talks about the idea seems to make it out to be. I mean, sure, you'd get the occasional evil genius trying to make a mint by going back to 1845 and "inventing" the microchip or alien being trying to unmake the beginning of life on Earth or vigilante trying to kill Hitler or keep that guy from having sex with that monkey or whatever and introducing AIDS to the world and in the end just screwing everything up, but in general I think it'd be a good thing. Because I think if everyone in the world had a time machine, there is one main thing that time travel would be used for:

Sleep.

Think about it. Our world would be so much happier if we had time machines. And much more productive, too.

Here's a scenario: Jeff is a very busy man from New York City. He has to be down at the office at 8:30 in the morning to, you know, office things. And if he's not there first thing, then there are all these things that need officing that won't be officed. And if he doesn't get in in time, Jeff will lose his job. But it's Monday, and Jeff got so plastered on Saturday that he didn't even realise how long he'd been up drinking and partying until he woke up at 3:47 Monday morning with a head pounding so bad that it felt like someone was hitting him in the head with a 42 inch aluminum TPX baseball bat. Which is because, of course, he *was* being hit in the head with a 42 inch aluminum TPX baseball bat by the homeless man who lived in the box Jeff had passed out on when he collapsed in an alley Sunday night. So after finally stopping the man from hitting him, apologizing profusely for destroying the man's box and offering him some money only to find out that everything in his wallet had been stolen while he laid there (actually by the homeless man, who also happened to be named Jeff, two facts that our hero would never find out), he walked home, content in the fact that he was part of one of the longest run-on sentences since Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

So Jeff went back home and went to bed, only to get up only three hours later with a pounding headache and a newly discovered broken jaw to get ready to go do some officing. Now, if Jeff had a time machine, he could go back about 15 hours, curl up in bed and die for a while, and still have plenty of time to get up for work, even going in early enough to avoid rush hour and office a few things before the boss showed up.

It would be great! All over the country office buildings and homes would have individual time machines for when people got tired. The lunch hour would be eliminated because people could walk down the hall, get in the time machine, go back for as long as they wanted, then come back and only be gone in real time for about a minute. Maybe five if they forgot to go to the bathroom before they came back.

And the best part? Hypothetically, everyone would be so happy about their easy new lives they wouldn't have to worry about going back in time and going all Evil Genius or Vigilante all over time's ass.