From the Future, Revisited

FROM THE FUTURE, REVISITED

10/18/00 14:12P EDT @lanta

I wish I had a head full of sports trivia so I could make a bundle on bets. Or maybe some clue what stocks to buy. In fact, some money to wager (either on events or the market) would be cool, but the skills I brought with me just weren't worth much in the current job market.

How about you go back fifty years in time and try to get someone to pay you for a facility with video editing or Java programming. Or AutoCAD. Or social engineering. Oh, wait. There's a market for that.

So with all of my contraband info about advances in the various sciences and technological applications, I still have to get a job in steam-powered leaf-spring and worm-gear computing and I still have ten years to wait until the style of clothes I like ("retro" for fifty years from now) comes into vogue.

You bastards.

And how much do you think I like typing?

Okay, okay, I hear you saying, "Why didn't you bring any of your cool toys back with you if ours aren't good enough for you?" Well I did, but all of my batteries ran down in the early nineties and none of the broadcast recharging stations have been built yet. Of course the brochures said the batteries would last another fifteen years, but since the equipment was supposed to be obsolete before the batteries died, who cares if the marketing department takes a little license?

Not to mention none of the publishing pods have been deployed yet either, so I couldn't be playing with anything that hadn't been cached in local storage before I left, anyway. Not even ^%#&ing Tetris, predictive q-level caching notwithstanding.

If I'd been an engineer rather than a merely technically adept social worker, I'd be in business. And it's another twenty years until the next bus out of this station.

In fact, I wish I had read this message. Damn Heisenberg. Damn Pauli. They're the ones who will keep me from reading this twenty of my personal years ago and getting them to damn some other grad student to a thirty-five-year nature study with you &%#$ing primitives.

You're still brushing your teeth, for SMM's sake! Ugh.

But at least I wasn't the one who signed up for the typhoid-and-consumption package.

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