A Large Salad

Instead of publishing the final chapter, I think instead I might have to post this link to better monitor the possible outcome of the Hadron Collider's insidious motives;

Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the world yet?

Since all I can do is wait, I think I will tell another true story for an eager audience.

I used to work at Wendy's. It was an interesting high school job, teaching me much about the world (and much about the assholes who live in it). I remember running the front counter one day, a seventeen-year-old me staring longingly into the far window.

Interrupting my gaze into the afternoon sunlight soon enough was an older woman, possibly in her forties or fifties. Clutching her purse tightly, she proceeded to timidly ask me if she could have a salad from our bountiful garden selection.

Without pausing, she then put out her palm in a stopping gesture, and said, "but I can't have carrots on it. For medical reasons, I can't eat root vegetables."

Not wasting any time myself, I then recited the names of the salads without carrots on them, subsequently pointing out their identifying photographs on the menu board behind me.

"Wait, does the Mandarin Chicken Salad have nuts or cucumbers on it?" she asked, more confidently than before.

"Unfortunately, it comes with a few nuts, and a handful of tart citrus reservoirs," I replied, as tactfully as possible.

"I can't have that then," she said, a frustrated grimace striking at me from her face.

I responded by trying to offer her a bare-bones salad, saying more or less that I could go into the back room and throw a bunch of lettuce into a plastic container for her eating pleasure.

"That would be great," she replied, enticing a relieved smile from me.

"Except..."

My smile spun around instantly.

"...I can't have any salads with any white lettuce," she finished. As soon as those words left her lips, I found myself boiling inside. At the time, I felt it was a complete waste of my time for her to go and ask for a dish that God himself would have struggled with. I still think that today, five years later.

I stared the woman right in the eye and extended this heart-felt question.

"Ma'am, if you can't eat carrots, cucumbers, or even lettuce, then why are you challenging my intellect by trying to order a salad? We've got a whole selection of food items that don't contain any of those things. They're called cheeseburgers. If you REALLY want to be safe, I'll pour you a cup of chili. I made sure there was no lettuce in it at 7:30 this morning."

She stared at me, just as shocked at my audacity as I was at her stupidity.

Needless to say, I got a nice word from my boss. It was worth every second.

A Few Theories

A Few Theories

The funny thing about time travel is that it knows no bounds—an agent of time travel can affect anything at anytime, anywhere. Let’s say that human beings become capable of traveling through time ten years, or even one hundred years down the road. That means that at any point in your life, someone from the future could make a drastic change to your life. If the change is made early enough, you would never realize a change was made, because that’s how you would have always remembered it to be.

What that means is that anyone who is important or famous (or for that matter any one of us who will someday be important or influential in some way) could be forever in danger. The only way this can be downplayed is if you consider the fact that if humanity takes a million years to advance its level of understanding in theoretical physics, they may not consider the idea of changing something millions of years in the past as being terribly significant.

The reason why I believe that human beings are capable of these advances relatively soon is precisely because of that fact. If I were to be warned of something in the near future, with my phone going crackers and physical traces of a company left for me to find which is working on these very theories, I am almost positive that it means that I am going to have an impact on something important within the next decade or so in my life.

I was also wondering about how my phone could have done what it did, and how someone may have been able to change a few relatively important and noticeable things about it.

Barring the fact that we don’t know what kinds of limitless technology we all may have in the future (and whether or not someone can screw with my phone at will), I’m willing to humor the idea that it may have been accidental, yet still congruous with the time travel theory.

I like my phone a lot. Every time I check my cell phone account balance and am told that I am way overdue for an upgrade, my immediate reactionary question is always “Why?”

Assuming that me in the future feels the same way (I like to think that I know the guy pretty well), and that cellular telephones operate by constantly receiving feedback from their networks, I believe that if I were to travel back through time and leave a clue for myself, our identical phones might have synchronized with each other on the network, despite the fact that two identical cell phones were displaying two distinct (yet identical) signatures.

I think that my phone may have reverted to match the timing and sync info of future me’s phone because, simply put—the phone that future me has is probably way more current and more updated. The only way this can be disproved is if you consider that in the future, perhaps those updates on future me’s phone weren’t invented yet. I’m willing to believe this one because the phone I have would probably still be able to recognize the same kind of information, even if future phone was outdated.

Phones don’t just go through massive changes at random. I drop my phone somewhat frequently, but I figure that these aren’t the typical “dropped phone” changes. Something else may very well be at work.