Remember 2010? Barack Obama was president, Australians were debating over immigration policy, and there was intense fighting in the Middle East. It almost feels like yesterday. But recently a man travelled back to that simpler time thanks to a hoverboard.
Mark Tamlin, a 39-year-old British man, was tinkering with his son’s hoverboard which seemed to be acting strangely. Whenever his 12-year-old son would step onto the two-wheeled scooter it would start shaking violently. So Tamlin tested it out himself and travelled back in time six years to that monumental year 2010 — suffering from temporary amnesia after falling and landing on his head.
“I don’t know what happened, but my son told me it started vibrating fast and then threw me up in the air, and I hit my head on the ground,” Mark Tamlin told The Sun newspaper. When he woke up in the hospital he told the doctors that he thought it was 2010. His memory returned after a couple of days, but he still can’t remember the fall.
But we can all envy Mr Tamlin, however briefly. Because if you woke up thinking it was 2010 and the doctors explained to you that it was actually the year 2016 and you’d had an accident on a hoverboard, your first reaction would probably be one of elation.
We did it! We finally did it! I can’t remember the hoverboard fall, but the doctors are telling me that it’s the year 2016, and we finally have hoverboards!
Except that we don’t. Well, not in the way that those innocent, naive folk of 2010 thought we’d have hoverboards, anyway. We have hoverboards — they’re just two-wheeled, self-balancing scooters. And they’re constantly on fire. Or wobbling uncontrollably at the very least. I guess we can add “time travel” to their list of unintentional features now.