The following happened during a small shareholder meeting being held in a convention center in New Mexico sometime in the future. That particular shareholder meeting had two purposes: account for a solid year of lost revenue and make reassurances to owners of common stock in that company that there'd be no repeat of the previous year's fiscal failure. "The problem," said by one of the executives of the company, who happens to be a majority shareholder of preferred stock in Temps & Tiempo Travel, reading from a TelePrompTer "was that we forgot the two most important words in the English language: shareholder value. We stood around and mocked time, both literally and metaphorically. However, the invisible hand of the market is a dutiful student to time. In the first quarter of the previous fiscal year, we decided to exploit a government loophole, an act of legislative fiat with unintended consequences, that allowed private corporations, such as ourselves, to manipulate quantum irregularities in the space-time continuum that not only make time travel possible but with the right technology affordable. As you know, we began to do a series of what we called, 'excursions into the past'. At first people enjoyed petting Triceratops or mocking baby Tyrannosaurus Rex's with a steak but after a while our customers wanted more bang for their buck. At the time many of our customers complained that the safari was an expensive petting zoo, and some even accused of us committing a fraud with pyrotechnics and animatronics. In dealing with those baseless accusations is where we made our mistake in the second quarter. We offered customers the opportunity to hunt down dinosaurs the way rich dentists and poachers during the turn of the 19th century used to hunt for ivory and the like. It should be noted that we technically violated no international or local body of laws because time travel is currently not under the jurisdiction of any single judicial body. Perhaps, due to the inactions of Temps & Tiempo Travels and other companies like it there will be a serious backlash crying out for a Time Protection Agency to be created. However, such backlash as yet to materialize. However, we certainly toed an ethical boundary and as is the nature of unethical behavior it is a tremendous powder-keg of public relations fallout waiting to explode. Poaching dinosaurs was a highly profitable venture until nine people died and many more were injured by more cunning versions of Dinosaur-beast. This would not have been a problem if not for a loophole in the law, which was not in our favor. This loophole allowed those who signed those liability waivers to argue that because the events of being mauled, and nearly killed by a group of Velociraptors happened, chronically speaking, before the agreement was even signed - which, of course, is sort of true given the nature of time travel itself. The courts felt that our liability waivers were null and void. It was in the words of the court, 'a retroactive document no more valid than someone writing a will for the deceased after they've passed away declaring themselves sole beneficiary'. This court decision, of course, without any surprise here, opened us to a whole world of liability. This is how an otherwise profitable quarter could quickly find itself with significant financial loss. So the tremendous profits were made at the time were certainly offset by the staggeringly high out-of-court settlements we ended up making. The third quarter of the last fiscal year, more or less, was the same story. Dinosaurs took b out of our customers and the customers in turn took huge bites of us with lawsuits. These lawsuits took the third quarter from black to red. Now, during the fourth quarter we felt we needed to find a new angle. Word had indeed spread that the 'Dinosaur Hunts' were not as safe as previously assumed. A significant decrease in our sales was a reflection of this trend in consumer preferences to not be eaten by dinosaurs, which is a reasonable expectation for our customers to have. We thought we could offset our slumping sales figures with a free hat and t-shirt giveaway but that didn't help much. Now I can see all the looks on your faces. How does Temp & Tiempo plan to get out of this predicament called a bad fiscal year and not produce a sequel of it? The answer is simple. So simple it can be summed up in two words. Grandpa safaris. Physicists say we can't kill our own grandfathers without creating irreconcible paradoxes. Temps and Tiempo Travel says, 'not a chance'."
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