Imagine yourself waking up one morning for work, thirty seven minutes early. Your alarm clock didn’t wake you up, and there weren’t any loud noises that could have woken you either. Outside your window, the world is dark and gray, the birds don’t sing and the sun doesn’t stream through your window. It’s a dull day. You go through your everyday motions, shower, clothes, brushing your teeth, coffee and the morning paper, and then out the door. You start your walk down the street to the bus stop when you realize that you forgot your eight page report for your boss. You rush home, hoping you won’t be too late for work. When you arrive back home, you find that you have to reprint your report, for the previous one you had has spilled ink on it from a broken pen.
Once your new paper is printed and fastened into a protective cover, you slip it into your briefcase, refasten your coat with a belt around your waist, and lock the door as you leave. Because of this delay from reprinting your paper, you arrive 6 minutes and 43 seconds late for work. This wouldn’t have mattered on a normal day, but today, as your boss forcefully reminds you as you stroll in the door, was the annual meeting with your whole company’s supervisor. Embarrassed, you bring your paper with you into the meeting, but find that your seat has been taken by a new intern on his first day. Had you not been late, you would have been able to take your seat first, and the intern could have found another one. Thin, frail, and nearly shaking with fright, the intern hides behind his enormous glasses and looks at you pathetically. You remove him from your seat and sit down, forcing him to sit at the end of the table by himself, in the only other available seat. While moving himself and his small heap of papers to the back, the intern drops his glasses on the move, while one of your colleagues accidentally rolls backwards onto the glasses, crushing them. Your colleague apologizes, but as the lenses are shattered, there is nothing really that he can do to repair them. Had you not been late to the meeting, you wouldn’t have needed to force the intern out of his seat, and he wouldn’t have broken his glasses during the move.
Once the intern is seated in the back, the meeting resumes. However, because of this seat change that was caused by your rude selfishness, the intern was unable to see the presentation being given, and was prevented from asking the two questions which he would have, had he been sitting in the seat he was before, the seat your fat, lazy butt now takes comfort in. The two questions which the intern would have asked, though shakily and uncertainly, would have aroused two very relevant conversations between you and all your colleagues at the table, causing the supervisor of the company, the one giving the presentation, a new angle on his proposal, causing him to think twice. Although, since the intern was unable to read the text of the presentation due to his broken glasses and the seat change because you were late to work and forgot your 8-page report which you end up gaining an extra day to work on anyway, these questions and therefore conversations were not brought up, and the supervisor leaves the building, believing that his new proposal is flawless. Neither you nor your colleagues had anything as insightful to say as the intern, who would have said something, had the seat change never happened. But it did.
Not knowing the flaws in his new proposal, the supervisor of your company takes his presentation to the mayor, asking that he take a look at it. Two weeks later, when the mayor believes he has fully reviewed and revised the supervisor’s proposal, he thinks that he found too many financial errors in the proposition, some that could take several months to think through and fix. Discouraged with this feedback, the supervisor decides to give up on his proposal all together. However, if you hadn’t gone back to reprint the paper that you never even turned in, the supervisor would have pursued his proposal, and never gotten discouraged by the mayor, because the questions the intern asked that arose the conversations would have fixed the majority of the errors that the mayor had turned him down for.
Disheartened by the rejection from the mayor on his proposal that took him nearly three years to organize, your supervisor goes out for a drink (or six) before he staggers home, a good 27 blocks away. When he arrives home at two in the morning, his wife notices how long it took him to get home, and smells the liquor on his breath. She assumes that he tried to sneak in, since he hadn’t had the sense to turn on any lights in the house, and was attempting to assume his position in the bed next to her as he did for 8,026 nights previously, as this was the night of their 22nd anniversary. They hadn’t had any children, though they had tried, and they had prayed that tonight would be their lucky night. However, since your supervisor came home late and missed the romantic dinner his wife had set up, they never got the chance that night. However, if he hadn’t been rejected by the mayor because of his perfected proposal because of the intern’s questions that never came, they would have been able to get pregnant that night.
Because your supervisor came home to his wife so late that night, and she thought he had an affair, she takes her car and drives to her parents’ house, a forty five minute drive. Your supervisor breaks the mirror in his bathroom and the ceiling fan in his rage, shattering several vases in the downstairs area and dashing contents of all the drawers in the kitchen on the floor, before crashing on the downstairs couch, not knowing that he had punctured his ventricular artery on his left arm in his madden rage. Meanwhile, his wife, in her sadness and regret, speeds down the freeway at 17 miles an hour above the speed limit. At the one, split second she directs her attention away from the road to wipe the tears out of her eyes, she drifts into the lane beside her, hitting the nose of her car on the tail end of a car she was passing. Her car spins off the road down a hill, where she fatally crashes at the bottom. However, she wouldn’t have been in the crash if she hadn’t have been upset by her husband because he came home late due to the rejection by the mayor.
Due to the fatality of his wife and the entering of himself into the hospital due to the entrance of the glass shard into his left arm, the two families lost all ties between them, leaving no one to take care of the supervisor in the hospital. The three children, Savannah, Charlie, and Katie, which would have been born to the supervisor and his wife that night were never born, and were never able to give birth to seven grandchildren between them, 25 great grandchildren, 96 great great grandchildren, and 385 great great great grandchildren, for a total of 509 immediate descendants that never were born. Among these descendents were the inventor of a world-wide communication device that would save thousands of lives from terrorists, the engineer who worked on the finishing touches of the emergency jet rocket that would save over a hundred guards stuck in the futuristic prison on the moon, and the scientist who developed the cure for cancer.
And all because you went back to reprint your report.