Midnight Pub

Why I don't teleport anymore

~tetris

Oh sure, it's got its fantastic upsides: overcoming that initial morning stay-in-bed inertia by teleporting onto the toilet and then into the shower, straight into a bundle of towels, kitchen, living room, etc, etc.

But that ends pretty quickly the minute you live with someone, and even *if* you clue them in on your secret, they never quite get over the shock of you suddenly appearing on top of them in the bathroom because you forgot they were there.

There's also the stress of trying to find a secure spot to teleport to. Take my commute, for instance: can I teleport straight to my desk? If I do it early enough (or late enough) in the day then probably. But who's to say that I bump into a coworker pulling an early/late shift, or if there's a camera secretly setup in the office to monitor us and I accidentally expose myself.

When I tried to find a consistently secure spot in the building populated by nobody most of the time, the only option I found was locking a toilet stall from the inside and then using it as a future anchor spot. This worked for a while, until somebody complained about the perpetually locked stall, and then I once came close to landing on someone doing their business. Plus the problem of having to explain to security about how I got in the building when they never saw me enter, especially on their toilet facing cams.

No, the best setup I came up with was to pick a remote place outside of the work grounds and teleport to there, and then use my two legs to walk to the building. Hard work I know, but I managed it for a bit. It was even pleasant; teleporting into the small green patch of trees next to the office, walking through the green and emerging at work refreshed after the 5 minute walk.

A year later they "renovated" the patch, and gone was my slice of privacy. I had to find other accessible spots near my work which I knew would be empty around peak commute time. I settled on setting up a web camera in my office and pointing it at the parking lot below my window. That way I could remotely check in advance to see if the spot behind the shipping container was empty or not and just port there. This was not a bulletproof system, and I startled my fair share of secret smokers, office romances, and urinating passersby.

After that I just gave up. Corona killed the need for it in the first place, and even after the "get-back-to-work" initiative, the sheer stress of using the power was outweighing any of its benefits. Plus, with my SO around and a kid on the way, I barely used it at home either.

Maybe if I find some time in the future, after work deadlines and the kids will I try to do something useful with this. Space or deep sea exploration entice me, but I can't really port to anywhere I've never been before. Maybe I'll just be a high price transport courier for small pocket-sized packages. Or maybe this power will die with me, unused, underutilized, a lost reflex decaying with the years as my increasing family priorities and decreasing energy and creativity completely overwhelm me.


skedaddle3644

Pro-tip, find out where the plant room is for your office building (where the air conditioning equipment lives), you will find it's likely massive. Room size, across whole floors in some cases.

Teleport there, there will be no security cameras, and highly likely to be no engineers in the morning. I know this, I used to be one of those engineers.

If anyone asks, just tell them you like it there to think, and have a bit of a break for “mental health”. No one will be the wiser.

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tetris

That's genius, aside from bumping into the actual engineers who are there for their mental health breaks ;-)

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squiddied

my old dog could teleport but he only ever did it around the house

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tetris

Yeah I think quite a few animals do it too. I'm convinced birds can't actually fly, but teleport centimeters at a time in succession through the sky

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alder

Had a roommate who did this all the time and it drove me nuts. I was convinced he'd pop out into the wrong place and have some grizzly accident. I wish it were more common or widely known so people weren't so freaked out and we could make accommodations to do it safely.

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tetris

It's hard to switch it off when you're young -- there's a weird thrill to it, despite it being physiologically the same as just tightening your buttcheeks. As for our survival rates, I've never ran the numbers though I'd be surprised if there are any active teleporters past their 40s

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inquiry

There's also the tardis option, given it seems most of your teleportation snafus seem more timing than spacing centric.

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tetris

You mean just, set up a permanent telephone box by my work place inaccessible to anyone other than me? I'm pretty sure someone will call the bomb squad if i tried to pull that

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inquiry

Good point.

<snaps fingers>

<puts right index finger to lips>

Perhaps you have a Jo Grant grade accomplice milling about near it, that there be sufficient bomb squad distraction?

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tetris

Perhaps, but I'd have to pay her a full time wage and she'd need to commute on my behalf probably every day to set up the whole thing. Nah, it's more hassle than it's worth

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inquiry

So is breathing, and yet....

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