I thought I would get back to some off-topic posting for a day, so stay tuned for more Distance Debugging Tomorrow.
When we first moved in to our house, we discovered that the previous owners had left behind a lot of stuff, and I mean everything from major pieces of furniture to random personal effects. I think they did it partly out of a misguided sense of altruism, and partly out of simple failure to look thoroughly since much of it was stuffed in the back of high shelves, etc.
Anyway, after my wife used a left-behind brown crayon stub to write down an important phone number, we decided that the house was actually filled with items placed there by our future selves to help solve problems we didn't yet know existed, a la the the movie Paycheck. For those who haven't seen the movie, it's yet another Phillip K. Dick short story stretched into a feature-length film. It revolves around a software engineer that works on a project so secret that he agrees to have his memory erased afterwards. When he "wakes up" after the memory erasure, he discovers that he has left himself an envelope of miscellaneous unfamiliar items. Spoiler Alert!!! It turns out that what he had been working on was a device that could look into the future, and he used the device while building it to see that he is going to be killed by this employer, and that it will be used for very bad things, so he then uses it to see how he might avoid the problems he will encounter by using innocent looking items. The majority of the movie is him finding funny and clever uses for the items to escape from various situations.
Here are few of the items that were left behind:
| Item | Theorized Use | Actual Use |
|---|---|---|
| Twin Bunkbed | Sudden pregnancy/Surprise custody | Unknown, gave away to neighbor |
| Old pink bathtowel | Put out flames of fire that would have destroyed house | Cleaned up something gross, threw out |
| Small crescent wrench | Escape from kidnappers' makeshift prison | Installed new shower head (good enough!) |
| Odd collection of municipal parking tickets mounted in frame | Clues to location of treasure? | TBD |
What's funny is that it got my wife and I thinking about the fact that often in our lives we have a similar kind of experience, where we learn something that seems tangential at the time, but shortly after we find a very important use for the information. It's as if our future selves have planted the information for us knowing that we would need it later. Do other people feel this way?