Things I heard about in the shower... (Part 1)

Like everything else that changes our world after it happens, I can remember where I was when I first learned that a team of physicists had managed to travel through time backwards – as opposed to the more popular mode of travel which involves space and/or time in a forward manner. I was in the shower. It was a weekday; I know this because I was running late for work and had that annoying brain itch that overshadowed everything I was doing and wouldn’t let me forget the fact that I was late and going to be later. My girlfriend was eating her bowl of breakfast as she nudged the bathroom door open with her foot.
“News stations are all going bat-shit,” she told me through the curtain.
Her mouth was full of milk and whatever, and the stream of water had been beating down on the back of my skull so I had to ask her to repeat it.
“Every station is talking about this science story thing. They’re really going nuts about it. You should see.”
Whenever I think of where I was when I learned of time travel (which is often, because people like to talk about it) I recall the noise made by my girlfriend’s chewing of her breakfast and the feeling of the rug beneath my bare feet and the thought that I really needed to vacuum.
The press conference was fairly boring by current news standards. The team of three physicists sat behind of table covered with microphones, in front of an enormous screen on which their “proof” was displayed. They seemed unprepared and definitely unrehearsed and it didn’t appear that any of them had shaved in a number of days. One of them was drunk, but that didn’t come out until much later and his reason for drinking was a profound fear of public speaking.
The crawl across the bottom of the screen read: ‘Team of M.I.T Scientists claim to have moved a recording device 5 seconds into the past…’
“What a waste,” said my girlfriend.
“No, this is huge. This is a big deal. Mark my words,” I told her as I re-wrapped a towel around my waist. “This is going to change a lot of things.” I remember her setting her cereal bowl down on the table without rinsing it, shouldering her bag, and using both hands to pull her hair into a pony tail and secure it with an elastic.
“Try not to get fired,” she told me as she dragged her massive set of keys off of the table and walked out.
I spent the next hour standing in front of the television watching the same loop of footage play over again as the news outlets scurried to find specialists to trot out in front of the camera. A new set of expressions immediately sprang into existence among the newscasters and indeed all of those who discussed the news – which was everyone, pretty much – who began to use them as if they always spoke of such things. Phrases such as ‘uncaused first cause’, ‘quantum superposition’, and allusions to Schrödinger’s cat flowed like details of the beach report or last Sunday’s football game from the mouths of newscasters who were normally about as deep as their hair coloring.