Three wishes

I’m sure we’ve all thought about this at some time or other, the fantasy that we are granted three wishes and what we would do with them.  Each of us goes through the same process of trying to identify wishes that you could tell your mother about, that weren’t too selfish, that were somehow good for mankind in general and that were phrased carefully as not to be landed with a wish that wasn’t quite what we meant.

If I ever had the opportunity to rub a magic lamp and out popped a Genii, these are what my three wishes would be:

My first wish would be to be able to communicate, without the need for the aid of any device, in any language and dialect of the world.  Not just to be able to speak it, or to read it but to be able to communicate in it. How cool would that be?  I would be able to converse across international borders, holding conversations in multiple languages simultaneously.  I would be able to translate Swahili into Mandarin or Afrikaans into Welsh.  This would be very useful for my global career and of course I would use such power not for personal gain but to solve global issues.  This is my unselfish wish. (Yeah right!)

My second wish is a little more personal and that would be to be able to go to sleep and wake up when and wherever I wanted to without any ill effects.  In essence my wish would be to be in compete control of my sleep patterns.  With this wish I could have a long lie in if it was a rainy day, or a power nap at work if I had a spare few minutes.  If it was a lovely sunny day, I could lie down in the grass and doze in the warmth to the sound of the skylarks flying above.  On the other hand, if I was busy I could stay awake and do all of the things that I’m usually too tied to achieve.  This wish might be a bit strange and I might need to phrase it a bit better.  Why would I ever want to sleep, would I always have something else to do?  It would be great however at the airport when a long delay is announced and I’d already done all of the duty free shops.

My third and final wish would be every man’s dream and that is to be able to properly multi-task.  I’m never sure that it is actually possible to do more than one thing really well at the same time although it is often claimed that this is a gender thing but what a great super-power this would be.  I can eat and watch television at the same time, quite some achievement in itself but I end up spilling something on my shirt every time.  How good would it be though to be able to read a book and watch television at the same time whilst taking in everything you were watching and reading?  Somehow I would need to be able to segment my brain, thread it in some way to allow it to perform multiple calculations simultaneously.  I would be a bit like a savant but would retain all of my social skills.  I would be able to give a problem to my brain and let it grind away while getting on with another task.  Being able to do two things at once would be immense, my productivity would be doubled but being able to do three or more things would be beyond comprehension.  I’ll not go into the detail of how this would work but leave that to the Genii instead.  I’m sure that they will be able to multi-task anyway.

These are my three wishes and all I need now is an old and battered lamp, an incarcerated Genii, a soft cloth and some Brasso.  I only hope I get them right when my time comes.