One calm Tuesday morning, the IT helpdesk received perhaps the most unusual ticket in its history. A user logged on, clearly flustered, and submitted a request that simply read: “My time machine is broken. Please fix it ASAP.” Naturally, the ticket caused a ripple of confusion and amusement among the tech team. They assumed it was some sort of prank or a metaphorical issue with their calendar software. Still, protocol dictated someone had to follow up.
The assigned technician, Dave, politely replied asking for more details. The user’s response was surprisingly detailed, describing an old, bulky contraption sitting under a tarp in their garage—complete with blinking lights, flashing dials, and what looked like a repurposed microwave oven glued to a collection of tangled wires. According to the user, the device was supposed to take them forward and backward in time, but instead, it hadn’t gone further than five seconds in either direction since they “built it last Thursday.”
Dave couldn’t resist visiting the user’s desk to get a firsthand look. Upon inspection, it was clear this “time machine” was a homemade project cobbled together from various household gadgets, an old alarm clock, a toaster timer, and what appeared to be soda can tabs serving as buttons. The “power switch” was actually a cleverly disguised flashlight.
After a few tentative tests (none of which produced any temporal displacement, only minor sparks), Dave had to break the news: despite his extensive tech expertise, he wasn’t qualified to fix something that might theoretically bend the space-time continuum. He gently suggested the user might be better off contacting a physicist. The user nodded thoughtfully and promised to “make sure it’s grounded next time.”
The ticket was closed with a note recommending “no unauthorized temporal experiments on company property.” To this day, Dave wonders if the user ever took their broken time machine back to 1985 or if it’s still gathering dust, waiting for someone brave enough to fix a device that’s literally out of time.