Tomorrow you wake up and you are in the exact same place you were when you woke up on 1/1/2000. You are physically the same person you were then also. And the actual date is 1/1/2000. The past (or future) ~12 years are gone.
Mentally however you have all the memories of those 12 years and yesterday to you was 12/1/2011.
The future is not guaranteed to unfold as it did in your memories. For example betting on sports won’t get you anywhere since the games are all basically redos.
Any kids born over those 12 years cease to exist and even though more kids will be born odds are they won’t be the same ones.
So, what happens at this point?
Immediate implications are do you remember enough of your past life to function? Do you know when you work next or when your next class is? Do you know how to perform your job? How do you function if you can’t remember alarm/door codes, passwords, phone numbers from then?
How do you react to your personal life? If you had any children born they are now lost forever. If you met your significant other during that time could you, would you try to start that relationship again? Could you get your career path to take the route? Would you want it to?
Larger question, could you get anybody to believe this happened to you by using knowlege you had in 2011? For instance 9/11 hasn’t happened yet but you know it’s in it’s planning stages. Can you do anything about it? Could you blow the whistle on Jerry Sandusky? Help find Jaycee Dugaard? Predict the housing crash? Warn Michael Jackson?
Feel free to take the hypothetical any direction you want.
My kids would be the same so I’d treasure their school years more. I’d hug my dog who would have another 1 1/2 years to live.
At work, I would begin to undermine those co-workers who would stab me in the back over the next ten years. I could do my job, but damned if I would remember all my passwords. I’m sure I’d be asking IT support for some password resets.
I’d go down to Florida and raise a big stink about the butterfly ballot and conduct voting lessons for the Palm Beach seniors. If that didn’t carry the state for Gore, I’d try to convince him to challenge all the counties.
Of course you pick that day. Send me back in time to wake up passed out across my apartment’s front door threshold…feet in the kitchen, head on the stoop. That wasn’t the best start to a new day I’ve ever had.
I’ll begin reliving the past after I sleep off this hangover.
I would buy up all of the Apple stock that I can. I know you said the future isn’t guaranteed to unfold the same way, but I’ll still bet pretty heavily on the iPod taking off.
Hmm, back in my freshman year of high school. I’d definitely party a lot harder and start having tons of young, nubile sex this time around. And then get the office to reset my locker combination, because there’s no goddamn way I can remember it anymore.
Well I wouldn’t be blindsided by my layoff in May 2000, I would make some different real estate decisions and I would NOT take a sabatical in July 2001. I would also join cochrane in the purchase of Apple stocks for my portfolio.
As for 9/11, I don’t know what I could do to provide the information without being locked up as a co-conspirator or in a psycho ward but I would do my best. If things are changing however I would imagine the date of the attack might too which could impeded attempts to minimize the damage.
You just told me my daughter was lost forever. I’d be in crazy grief over that. I know where I worked, and I could probably reconstruct my passwords; if not, I’d file a lot of requests.
I like the bit about Florida.
In March 2001, I’d go to FBI HQ and say that I have information about an attack on US soil from al Qaeda, and that either now or in the near future there will be Middle-Eastern citizens at flight schools studying how to take off in a jet but not how to land it, and that security should be secretly extra tight on 9/11, and I would absolutely refuse as long as I could to explain my sources for this information.
Instead of saving for a new car in '04 I’d be buying up land in a certain part of the county and flipping it. I’d get a MUCH better return. (aprox. 50:1 over 2 years). I’d only be a year into my new job, so I’d suddenly be much better at it and I’d avoid saying and doing certain regrettable things. I’d hit on that one blonde girl.
Oh cripes, that was a long time ago. I was just a wee thing back then, just turned nine years old. Knowing what I know now*, I would tell my parents I wanted to leave the school I attended at the end of the year and enroll in the public school gifted program that I had just recently tested into.
I would know a lot more about how to comport myself in social situations, and I would probably make friends a lot more easily than I really did when I was nine. Especially if I did go to said gifted program - I could meet other mini geeks like me.
I would probably focus myself in a completely different direction academically - I think I would learn about computer science, because a) it’s super fun and b) it’s been really beneficial for my friends who studied it in terms of job opportunities.
To generally enrich my life, I’d read more good books and pick up good eating and exercise habits. I think mom and dad would be pretty shocked that their uber-picky eater daughter suddenly wanted to try curry and sushi.
In the immediate term, I’d wear warm clothes that day. We’re going from Phoenix to Sedona to Grand Canyon; a cold front will come through Sedona while we’re there, and it’ll be snowing in Grand Canyon. (When we piled off the bus in Grand Canyon, the first thing I did was pull my sweatshirt and other warm clothing out of my suitcase, and put them on. THEN I looked for my room key.)
Be more sociable with the single girls on the tour. Find a way to make out with one of them when we hit Vegas the following week.
Similarly, that girl that I met at Worldcon 2001, make out with her too.
Longer term is where things get interesting. If I try to go meet my future (in this time stream) bride, we’ll never get married. And if I know what’s going to happen personally, I may not be the right kind of person to meet her, hit it off, and get married when we do meet. So I don’t know.
In large, find a way to pass along the anonymous tip about al-Q. There’s no way to be certain that in this time stream the attacks will happen as they originally did, so tips will have to be specific enough to be taken seriously, but general enough for appropriate preparations.
My biggest problem would be I wouldn’t know where I lived. Seriously. I moved every four months during university.
Let’s see. The term after that one I was living in the house with the super creepy landlord…I remember now. The apartment by the place with the great cheap wings.
But I am dating Jealous and Abusive Guy from Hell and he lives in the same apartment. Oh, hell this is going to be tricky to get out of.
My class schedule was always in the same place (second pocket from the front in my backpack) and we are on winter break so I have no catching up to do.
But wait, I remember what I did for new year’s! We were all in a ski chalet in NH. What a great time! My first order of business will be to take two tylenol, drink a litre of water (hangover) and get in that outdoor hottub! Winter hottubbing rocks.
But really, as much as I wouldn’t want to have to take all those hard courses again, I would live the rest of my college time to the limit. I so miss the freedom I had back then…
My sweet little girl would never have been born. That would break my heart. I don’t know how I could go on, but at least I’d know she didn’t suffer since she was never born.
I know this much. I’d have said “No thank you” to the offer of the construction job and gone back to school. I’d never have met Mig, which would be for the best.
1/1/2000: First day of retirement. Only three of my six grandchildren would have been born. Instead of buying a lot of MS stock, I would buy Apple. Since I knew Sergei Brin, I would see if I could invest in Google. I would certainly try to buy the IPO. Other than that, there is really nothing I would want to do different. Maybe go on a crash weight loss to try to avoid diabetes. And maybe I would decide not to walk to my office (I still had one) on that day in 2005 that I slipped on black ice and fractured my ankle (although that had no long-term consequences).
Hm, I was getting ready to go to Germany to visit a friend in Feb. mrAru was 2 years from retiring from the Navy. I was going to be starting a new to me jobn on 9/12 :eek:
Instead of staying just one month, I think I would renegotiate for the whole 6 months that you can stay in Germany without going for a specialized visa, I had enough money in my bank account for it, and it would have been fun. Our roomie would have been fine on taking care of the farm with mrAru’s boat doing crazy scheduled in and out cruises.
That job was one of my absolute favorites. State Farm had a call center in Cheshire, and half way through training my class of CSRs, they decided they were going to close down the call center, and offered us either a move to another job center at the same pay scale [I was making $17 an hour, I could have moved to the Texas call center which normally paid $8 an hour at what their team leads were making.] I would discuss it with mrAru and move to Texas. Financially we would be much better off, as he would have put the house on the market and our roomie would have moved to Texas with the critters and household goods and mrAru would have moved into barracks for the last bit of his enlistment. I would probably still be working for State Farm, and mrAru would have found a job in Texas after demobbing. The darned near double income would have made living there and affording a rental house easier than it would have been if I would be making the same $8+ per hour that local employees started with. And I would have taken a refresher course in spanish =)
I think I would have then taken the money that I got from Dad’s estate 3 years ago [and I would have encouraged him to make sure the rehab place was giving him enough blood thinners post-op so he wouldn’t throw a clot and stroke out to try and change history a bit] and invested it in land in California with an eye towards moving there.