Today in time travel

For an instantaneous form of communication, e-mail is sometimes anything but. We've all suffered from problems with slow servers that delayed the delivery of your mail by, say, half an hour, or in more extreme cases, a day or two.

This morning, I arrived at the office to find one of the frequent "notes to self" that I often send from my home account to my work account over a weekend. Only, I didn't recall sending any such message. When had this happened? Unable to account for this, I opened it to realize that I had sent it after all -- on June 14. Seven months ago.

So why was it just arriving? The IT department at work wasn't at fault, as one might assume. Rather, I'd tried to send myself a relatively large file, Outlook had run into problems, and I assumed it had aborted. Then, when I finally left Outlook open overnight months later, it went through after all. no real mystery after all. Still, it was a little disorienting.

And yet, perhaps it better equipped me to immediately accept the contents of a website brought to my attention by a coworker, an archive of the compiled forum postings of one John Titor, purportedly a time-traveller from the year 2036. My immediate response was, Yeah, okay, he's a time traveller. He came here in his car, like Marty McFly. I can dig it.

I mean, when you start the day thinking that you've perhaps just gotten e-mail from a future self, it's not hard to accept that maybe other people are tooling about the timeline in their magic hot rods. Especially when you've only got three hours of sleep in your immediate past, and all your coffees are still in the future.