You’re a thirteen year old boy who has just discovered that your wardrobe has the magical ability to teleport you to another place in time. Whenever you go inside the wardrobe, a bright light appears and you find yourself inside the locked broom closet of a bus station in Minneapolis, eight minutes into the future. You don’t know how to get out of the closet, and there’s nothing really for you to do there. The best you can do is go into the wardrobe and then listen through the broom closet door to the conversations in the bus station, trying to see if you can get some hint of what the future holds based on what the travelers are all talking about. So, for example, let’s say it was the day OJ was acquitted back in 1994 at the close of the Trial of the Century and you were eight minutes away from the verdict. You could go into the wardrobe and then listen through the broom closet door to people shouting in either joy or disillusionment at the verdict. Eventually someone might say something like, “I can’t believe he got off,” and you would have known the verdict before anyone else.
Since a situation like that doesn’t come along too often, you’ve been using the wardrobe to smoke cigarettes without your parents catching you, and without and risk of harming your lungs since you always smoke in the future. When you return, it’s like you never left and therefore never smoked. You’re really enjoying smoking and it’s getting hard to wait to get into the wardrobe to have another cigarette.
Happy The Magical Wardrobe Day!