Anthropologists on the Psych Ward (5): Quantum Distortions in Time

Our resident anthropologist, Miskatonic University’s Professor Humphrey G Escobar – distinguised scholar and author of The 101 Funniest One-Liners of Vlad the Impaler – is currently hunting Shoggoths in Antarctica. He was able to send us this e-mail via satellite link-up.

Professor Escobar writes:

Physicists now tell us that time is not the constant certainty we thought it was. Time is elastic and relative. It bends and stretches. It can be distorted and bent. This quality can be seen in long-term NHS planning.

To give an example:

A unit is due to move from its current (shabby, falling apart at the seams) building to a new, purpose-built one with state-of-the-art facilities. The moving date has been delayed several times. Currently, the schedule is for the move to take place in June of next year.

The ward manager emerges from yet another planning meeting.

Staff nurse: “How did the meeting go? More delays, I expect.”

Ward manager: “Nope. There’s no new delays. Everything’s still on schedule for next August.”

Staff nurse: “#*$%! It was supposed to be scheduled for June!”

As can be seen. Two months have just appeared in the schedule, with no apparent explanation or rationale. This phenomenon is due to the fact that – as many of you have no doubt suspected – the top strata of NHS management are cultists working for the Great Old Ones.

Anyone who has any contact with the Great Old Ones will know of their ability to manipulate time. Indeed, on my current trip I was recently stalking a shoggoth through the dread remains of a Cyclopean ruined city, and I suddenly found myself blown into the middle of the previous month. This has happened to me so frequently that I’ve taken to carrying a spare fortnight in my rucksack when I’m out shoggoth-hunting. Even so, I’ve still wound up having to attend my son’s bar mitzvah three times, and the little bugger hasn’t even been born yet. Still, at least I got to find out well in advance that he’s going to be a crashing disappointment.

These distortions of time have been noted upon in the Necronomicon:

…And thee poor benighted humanns wyll attempt to ymprove theyr publick servyces…and the Great Old Ones wyll confuse and torment them with the madness of fundyng applications, and warp thee quantum nature of tyme so that entyre months or years are lost into great chasms of inter-service polytycs.

And once the poor humans have endured even these trials, the Great Old Ones will thrust them screamyng into the morass of the Consultaytion, and foul hordes of nimbys will descend upon them, shreyking in eldritch voices, “You’re not putting that bloody building full of loonies and paedos anywhere near my house!” And thus the humans and their once-proud inteyntions are left wandering for years in a vast desert, their minds destroyed, their souls broken.

Yours Sincerely

Humphrey G Escobar

All correspondence to: Delta Ice Station, Queen Maud Land, Antarctica. Just don’t send any more of those bermuda shorts and bottles of suntan lotion. It wasn’t funny the first time and I’m bloody freezing enough without you lot taking the piss.