I have the habit of being late

I have the habit of being late. Usually by five minutes. I tell myself it’s okay because, “What is time? It’s a construct to help people maneuver within the abstract.” However, others don’t see it that way and claim I am rude. I’m not bothered because like Euripides said, “Thus we are a vast collection of opinion machinery, diverse as the follicles on the tail end of the Deity.”

Occasionally my lateness also extends to time travel. For instance there was the moment I took my time machine back to May 30, 1431, Rouen, France, to save Joan of Arc. I arrived five minutes after she was burnt at the stake. No one claimed that I had shown bad manners. I scooped up her ashes and put them in a plastic bag so I could sell them later on eBay. You wouldn’t believe the market for post execution memorabilia. (To show I’m not heartless, I re-configured the time coordinates, got back to the same location ten minutes earlier, rescued Joan, brought her back to the current time, hired her as my assistant, she facilitated the sale of her ashes, and I gave her a 10% commission!)

A further example is when I went back in time to see the birth of the Big Bang. I wanted to take a picture so I could sell it to Chalmer’s Science Digest. But I was five minutes late again. Instantly I was swept along by the rapid propulsion of the mighty momentum of particles of light, energy, and matter, like a stick in the rapids. I clung to the raft of my time machine, fearing the force would tear me to pieces. For once I felt that perhaps being late is a personal detriment. But it turns out the Big Bang was only five and a quarter minutes long. The rapids quickly quelled into the docility of everything and settled into its place, like a placid lake. I time traveled back to the current time, wrote about my adventures in explicit detail, and won the Nobel Prize for Physics!