Chancelucky and the Really New Year

I was responding to comments on this blog just before the New Year last night when the oddest thing happened. Each time I started trying to click on a new page or submit a comment, my computer started telling me that I had a “security problem.”
It insisted that the security rights for my page had expired in 2008. Talk about time flying as you get older!

I checked the date on my computer which told me that it was now 9:36 PM New Year’s Eve 2150. I figured this was good news. George W. Bush had been out of office for more than a hundred and forty years, assuming the two term rule still applied in 2008, and the world still had computers, electricity, and the internet. He hadn't killed us all after all. In fact, my study with its six sets of homebuilt speakers, three amplifiers, and hundreds of LPs that I no longer listen to, looked remarkably good for being a hundred and seventy years old. There were a few cobwebs here and there, but that was true back in 2006.

Was this the Y2k bug showing up seven years too late? On a national and international level, I do think skipping the seven years since the Supreme Court decided that equal protection applied to uncounted ballots instead of actual voters wouldn’t be the worst idea. Even in sports, I wouldn’t have missed any significant events in Warriors, 49er, or Stanford sports history. It also would have erased the whole 6th game of the world series with the Angels where the Giants had the wrong Rodriguez pitching in relief for them.
All in all, if I was going to be thrust forward a hundred and fifty years I would have much preferred having it happen to me when Y2k was the biggest worry in the news.

Having briefly contemplated the possibility that I had somehow slipped on a banana peel in the time space continuum, it did occur to me that there was simply something wrong with my computer. I clicked on the little icon with the time in the lower right corner of my display and all those security certificate warnings went away and my screen went back to normal. Now, I’m sitting here wondering if I did the right thing. I guess I could just change it back to New Year’s Eve 2150 again or any date I wanted for that matter. What would happen for instance if I changed the date on my computer to some time before they existed like 1832? Could you have the Windows operating system before anyone had thought of windows for instance? What if I set the date to 1906 and then went to the yahoo home page to see what the news was that day?

I guess that’s my problem. When it was 2150 and I skipped 143 years, I wasn’t the sort of person who had the guts to get up from my seat in front of the screen, walk a few steps, open the door to my study or even one of the windows to take a look around before I simply clicked myself back to a continuous-sequential 2007. I promise myself that next time something like this happens to me, I’ll at least explore a bit. All that time on Internet Explorer and it turns out that I’m the sort who prefers to stay at home.

It does occur to me that Bill Gates’s operating system is bound by time, but maybe God’s (or whatever universe builder you have in mind) real operating system doesn’t take time quite as literally as we do. Or maybe time itself works differently than we’ve been trained to think. Why the heck was I so scared by a warning on my computer screen that told me that my security certificate wasn’t in order because it expired back in 2008, 142 years ago?

In any case, Happy New Year to anyone reading this, whatever year it happens to be for you.

chancelucky