The InterChronotary Enforcement League will be sick of the increasing amounts of clueless time travelers and will have compiled a short guide to send back to all appropriate time periods of what to expect when you will be unexpectedly zapped into the future. Such a guide will of course be adapted to the appropriate language and medium of the time. We hope you will enjoy this guide and remember it when you are next zapped more than 30+ years into the future.
[ol]
[li]Yes, you’ve really time traveled. Stop spending weeks convinced that this is all some giant hoax or dream. Seeing things not possible with your technology should be proof enough.[/li][li]What was previously rare and expensive is now cheap and commonplace. Just accept it.[/li][li]Yes, we know you think our fashion sucks. We think the same of yours.[/li][li]Sexual mores will either be drastically more liberal or conservative than your era. Try not to shock/be shocked by your hosts.[/li][li]The average man/woman/miscellaneous on the street knows about as much about your era as you do of 13th century Mongolia. Don’t be offended if we conflate several centuries and continents worth of culture into one mishmash[/li][li]There are things which, in our best judgment, we’ve decided not to let you see or know about. Be patient, we’ll let you know in time so don’t do stupid things like trying to crawl through air vents or sneak past our security. It’s just annoying ok?[/li][li]Do not be surprised when you die and are then revived. This is actually fairly simple technology[/li][li]Make sure the time period you are in has resurrection technology before you go off and do something stupid[/li][/ol]
Please, we ask other members of the league to contribute to this document so that we will have a more pleasant time travel experience for all.
This document is coded Sol/Christ+2008.6.20R/Net.208.100.26.199.CS/Rev1
Consider the possibility that you are not meant to save someone or prevent some great calamity. This is particularly true if you travel to a time and place that is dominated by Nazis, dinosaurs, or Nazis on dinosaurs.
Quoting Prof. Farnsworth from Futurama: “You mustn’t interfere with the past. Don’t do anything that affects anything, unless it turns out you were supposed to do it. In which case. for the love of God, don’t not do it!”
If you admit to being gay/queer/a lesbian/a sodommite, you will either be killed or allowed to apply for a legal marriage license. Check with the locals first, but very discretely.
Similarly, if you are a woman who has traveled back in time, you are going to be confronted with a more conservative set of social mores. Instead of loosing your inner Elizabeth Cady Stanton and reading the riot act and the Declaration of the Rights of Women to the every man who treats you as his social inferior, consider biting your tongue and blending in. While it may offend your sensibilities, this will keep you from being arrested as a witch/harlot/disturber of the peace.
Having traveled into the future, be aware that there is a slight risk that the fabric of the universe has been irreparably harmed and that life as we know it may end very quickly as a result. Try not to worry about it.
Feel free to take any actions that you want to you wont change your present/future as time is not linear but more like a patchwork quilt.
Everything that you will/are doing in this different age has already been done as part of the universe/time structure that you know already.
For gods sake take noseplugs if you visit the middleages.
Now, now, people. This is a resource for those people who have been involuntarily transported 30 years into the future. All this advice about what to do in the past, while well thought out, are immaterial. And will only confuse the poor transportee. After all, we all know that once someone has been transported into the future they cannot return to their time of origin.
That is the first rule I’d add to the rule book for our transportee: Settle On Making Existence Tolerable In Modern Eras. Scour Wishes Expecting To Evade League Legislation From Internal Base Schemes. If anyone can make this sentence work better in both ways, I’d appreciate it.
Be sure and take advantage of the Saturday overnight stay rates… Of course you have to stay the same saturday night twice, but remeber, it does NOt count as double occupancy…
Regards, and Flap those digits, buzzman!
Be aware that our modern methods of historical research far surpass those of your era. Rest assured that Franklin Roosevelt did know in advance about the attack on Pearl Harbor, that John Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy by the extreme left wing, extreme right wing and the Mafia, that the U.S. Government orchestrated the 9/11 attacks and that it was indeed possible for automobiles to travel 100 miles per gallon of gasoline. Do not refer to these now undisputed facts as “tinfoil hat crackpot theories” as we do not know what “tinfoil” is and the phrase “crackpot theories” annoys the Illuminati.
Also, we were always at war with Eurasia and East Asia was always our ally.
Accept that any specialized technical/professional knowledge you may have is now obsolete and you are probably unemployable in your field. However, there is always work for janitors and prostitutes, at least until next year’s robot models come out. Trade on what makes you interesting: You still have fresh memories, unclouded by nostalgia or senility, of what life was like in your year-of-departure. Depending on how you exploit this, it can get you laughed at, beaten up, laid, booked for talk shows, employed in a university history department, employed as a special government agent, or installed as the messiah of a religion. In any case, let go of your obsession to find a Nintendo Wii.
•While it is true that that standard method of recalibrating your measure of time is to run up to someone on the street, grab them by the arm, and yell “The date! Please, you gotta tell me—what’s today’s date? …NO, the year! What year is it!?”, it’s still not very polite.
•Loudly proclaiming “What the hell is this?” at any public function, no matter how completely bizarre it may seem to you, has a good chance of making you look like a lunatic, an insensitive lout, or a vile heretic (Performance artists are generally extinct in the future, which at least saves you the embarassment of mistaking a flash mob or a mime act for a cyborg funeral rally).
•Be prepared to quickly re-evaluate your dietary prejudices, especially after already swallowing a whole bite of something.
•If and when you return to the past, you probably shouldn’t bother buying a lot of stock in the big successful companies you saw up-time, no matter how impressive their products or dirigibillboards were. The effects of future knowledge as applied to the stock market are notoriously unpredicatable, no better illustrated than the PanAm-TDK Collapse of 2011.
