Great Minds

It starts sometime that morning. As you stumble out of bed to the noise of your alarm clock, you wish that it would just shut up. To your surprise, it stops mid-tone, not continuing like it usually does. You brush it off, thinking that it's probably just a malfunction.

"Great, John, looks like you'll have to get a new alarm clock soon," you think, stepping into the shower. The water starts and stops when you turn the knob, despite the fact that you've paid your bills. It's not a great part of town, and you're not that rich, but seriously, is a working shower too much to ask for? You wish it would just work for once.

Not a moment later, water begins to pour out of the shower nozzle, an uninterrupted stream. Thank the lord. It keeps on coming, and you enjoy the feeling of the hot water spraying across your back for a few moments before you step off and get dressed for the day. You work at some local clothes shop in the mall, so you put on a button-down shirt that the shopkeeper requires employees to wear. Although you're an academic who has contemplated about many subjects deeply, you've lacked the motivation to stick through with college, finding the material offered too easy, or the college itself too expensive.

Looking in the mirror, you groan as you realize that a button has popped off and is missing. You look at your shirt and wish that the button would just be there. To your surprise, it is. But it wasn't when you just looked a second ago. You narrow your eyes, looking down at your shirt to confirm that it is there. You touch it, feeling the round edge as you think about what happens.

You begin to make the connection- the alarm clock, the shower, now the button. Could it be that something more powerful is at work here? You think for a while about what you could wish for, and then wish for a functional, smaller alarm clock. You see the bulkier thing you had before get instantly replaced by a much smaller one, and you nod sagely, trying to grasp the implications of everything that has just happened. You take your time to consider your options, and then make your decision.