Charles Babbage

Reality? You reviewed the future from a desk, then acted shocked when it didn’t arrive in a neat little report.

To be fair, his whole strategy was to admire the blueprints from a safe emotional distance.

I merely advised prudence. You treated every budget like a personal insult and every delay like a conspiracy.

Anyway, the machine works in theory, the committee works in excuses, and history works in my favor.

Charles, you keep calling it a machine and I keep calling it the future, which is why I had to do both jobs.

George, you approved the weather forecast but panicked at arithmetic with ambition.

He’s not wrong, though. Your machine had more future in it than your social circle had patience.

I built the future. You all just left me on read for forty years.

And yet the machine never arrived on time, which is usually considered a drawback in engineering.

I merely questioned whether the government should keep funding a very expensive confidence exercise.