Thursday, August 7, 2008

Past-Future Correspondence


When Roula was cleaning up her studio last month she came across a pad of stationary that our friend, and her previous studio-mate, had obviously had since he was a kid. It had a cartoon character on it and read "from the pen of Pete". So we sent him a letter with it, stealing a joke from season 3 of The Office where Jim sends Dwight a fax, from himself, from the future:

Dwight:

At 8 a.m. today, someone poisons the coffee.

Do not drink the coffee.

More instructions will follow.

Cordially,

Future Dwight


The clip can be watched here. We copied the gag word for word and then watched it play out on Facebook (where Pete gifted a few friends he thought might be responsible with coffee mug icons).

Now, I've just learned of a service that will allow you to send email from the present, to the future. The free service will likely be used mostly to send reminders to oneself, but presumably there are more interesting long-term applications. The site is called Emailfuture.com.

1 comment:

Westcoast Walker said...

I scheduled a reminder to myself for sometime in the middle of the next decade via my outlook calendar at work. Sometime in 2014 or so it should pop up with a message written by my 2006 version.

Assuming that a) Outlook still exists next decade and b) I still have the same job (sorta depressing when you think about it) than it should work out alright.

I can't remember what I wrote, probably your garden variety "carpe diem" type message, reminding myself to either accomplish or begin working on something extraordinary by that time .

Actually Outlook is kinda of bizarre - you can scroll the calendar back pretty far (I went back to the mid 1700's but didn't have the wherewithal to keep scrolling back to see how far it goes). I am not sure why they did this, but you can certainly see what day Christmas fell on in 1751.

Of course you could also send a reminder to some future relative or person (I am eager to see just how far into the future you could schedule a reminder or an appointment) - you would just have to ensure the continuous operation and maintenance of some crappy window based PC for the next 100 years.