Everyone goes through life dropping crumbs. If you can recognize the crumbs, you can trace a path all the way back from your death certificate to the dinner and a movie that resulted in you in the first place.

- Daryl Zero, Zero Effect

Sometimes, when you're making your way through your mundane life, you run across crumbs left by extraordinary people. Usually these clues go unnoticed, because from the perspective of the mundane world they are seen in a mundane context. However, sometimes those clues are hard to ignore, and harder to forget; that's the nature of my physical evidence. What follows is a true account, followed by my analysis. What follows is my brush with the extraordinary.

The day it happened was about 2 years ago. I don't remember exactly, but I have reason to believe it was May 13, 2000, couldn't really be sure though. I was waiting around a major Canadian bank (Scotiabank) for my girlfriend who works there as a teller. I thought it would be funny to grab a withdrawal slip and write her name on it and bring it up to her, trying to withdraw her from the bank. Damn, you know what? That is pretty funny. So I grab a withdrawal slip and almost started to write on it, but I noticed this one was already sullied with someone else's error. They had only filled in the date portion of the slip: "MAY 13 / 2002".

2002. Whoops. That's a pretty weird mistake eh? If you write a lot of checks, you might get used to writing 1999 or whatever, and when the date rolls over you occasionally make the mistake of writing the previous date, out of habit. I can remember doing that on things at school a lot. Out of habit.

There are tons of explanations for this. Perhaps it was just a freak mistake. Perhaps they just finished writing a lot of forward-dated documents or post-dated checks or whatever. I guess that could be true. The fact that this person was writing shit 2 years ahead of time is a pretty big mystery in itself. My personal theory goes a bit more something like this:

This person spends some time in the year 2002, gathering information that would be valuable 2 years previous, such as: stock information, sports outcomes, technological advances, scientific discoveries, what the fuck the baby boomers are up to, whatever.

This person travels back in time to 2000. He/she invests in stocks, bets on sports, sells technological information and sells information about scientific advances.

Decides to get some spending money out for a few days of fun in good old 2000, grabs a withdrawal slip (maybe the time travel process destroys the magnetic encoding on debit cards, I dunno) and accidentally writes 2002! It doesn't really matter, no one will suspect. Get a new one.

I don't really have any evidence to support any of that, but I do still have that withdrawal slip. All I've got is a crumb, but that's more than a lot of people ever get. That tiny glimpse into something other than the mundane remains on my cork board with my other collected notables, but it doesn't really belong there; it outshines the rest. It's a reminder. It's an inspiration. Don't be so quick to dismiss things you notice are out of place. To experience the extraordinary you have to keep an open mind and an open eye, 'cause it's out there, dropping crumbs.

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