h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Here is your death certificate sir.

I wish tea was more popular than coffee.

It is, but you prefer coffee. To make matters worse, any locally available coffee is both expensive and very badly made.

I wish this cold would shift.

The epicenter moves three feet to the left. It also gets even colder.


I wish I had a set of silverware that was actually made of silver.

Granted!

You can now look forward to spending all day every Saturday polishing it to remove the week's accumulation of tarnish, unless its a modern manufacture of stainless silver, silver alloyed with 1% platinum.




Just when everything seems about to level off and it seems I can concentrate my attention on productive efforts, another crisis arises.

I hope when I'm done with the current crisis, things LEVEL OFF!

The crisis requires all of your resources to resolve. Once it passes, things "level off" in a state of destitution. It doesn't get any worse than that, but you spend the next five years living paycheck to paycheck.


I wish for a new kind of potato chip with a flavor I really like.

Here you go, one bag of crisps in a flavour you didn't even realise you'd like until you tasted them. Whoah, slow down... that was the last bag of them in the world, ever. The only way to get more would be to hijack the or you could put them through one of the replicators in Star Trek.

I wish it was next week.

Not so fast, you'll forget to take your lottery ticket with you.... Oh. Well, I guess I'll just keep it for myself.


I wish I was hungry.

You're not just hungry, you're ravenous. You ate the only thing which looked vaguely edible about 10 minutes ago - a dozen or so glossy black bittersweet berries, which left your tongue feeling a bit numb. If I were you I'd call an ambulance before passing out.

I wish my body would stop ganging up on me.

A wild optical nerve jumps out from the bushes.

I wish my mid 20s would last.

and not in an awful way like Summer of 69.

You'll spend the next 80 years as a 25 year old, with the worst quarterlife crisis ever.

I wish that everything I wanted to get done got done.

Now that that's finished you have nothing left to do, for today, the next day, there is no more life, where is the beer, it is the next year, what is this void, I used to eat things, and the next decade and century, you knew people...

I wish I lived in a more hilly area.

Turns out the rent is twice what it costs you now.


I wish I came from an "old-money" family that had a perpetually-replenishing Trust Fund.

You do, but they've cut you off without a penny after a row about pouring more than your fair share of gravy over your Sunday dinner. Even so, you still get people fawning over you in the hope of a handout and calling you stingy if you don't pay as much as they think you can easily afford (according the stories in the various media of how extravagant your rich relatves are).

I wish that people really heard what they were saying, as they said it, instead of apparently flapping their tongues without realising.

No thanks to that particular variety, a perfectly good afternoon was soured. Not ruined, just soured.

http://xkcd.com/481/

Once people begin to realize how stupid they're being, huge segments of the population slip into depression.


I wish I was suave and sophisticated and intriguingly mysterious.

Granted!

However, most people interpret 'suave' as, if decidedly not vanilla, at least lanolin greasy, evoking shuddery visions of grease traps not cleaned since times immemorial, 'sophisticated' as speciously sophistical and 'intriguingly mysterious' as downright suspicious.




I wish computers came equipped with 'shoot back' buttons for use in response to hackers given to making global internet attacks and micellaneous other internet nuisances.

Unfortunately the hackers appropriate the button as well, and the entire internet is brought down in the crossfire.


I wish for a clean slate.

And cup cakes. Lots of cup cakes.

Granted!

...and a kitten to go with the cupcakes.

The kitten, though, proves to be a lion cub with a prodigious appetite, an excessively affectionate nature, a rasplike tongue, and attitude!

...and an irritating habit of raking its claws over the slate.




I wish the auto industry would master the trick of crafting plastic-with-a-memory auto bodies so that minor fender benders would simply straighten themselves out

(A prescient wish indeed... )



Success! Plastic-With-a-Memory auto bodies for all! At $20,000 a car.

(And them's the cheap ones.)



I wish milk could last for months in the fridge instead of only a couple of weeks.

"I wish milk could last for months in the fridge instead of only a couple of weeks."
Granted Did I mention that it's dog milk, as mentioned in that episode of Red Dwarf?

I wish that I'll officially be able to complete NaJoPoMo this year, as well as a couple of stories which won't get past the censor here.