[ WP ] You find a hourglass that when used , lets you travel 3 minutes back in time

Well, I've tried it at least a hundred times. 
 
 Nothing fucking worked. 
 
 Do you know how little time three minutes actually is? Maybe it sounds like a lot, I do n't know. It's the length of a typical song, for starters, and just a bit longer than a typical movie trailer. It's longer than almost anyone can hold his breath. It's also about the length of time that someone can engage in an otherwise un-stimulating task without his mind wondering irrevocably. 
 
 Three minutes, in short, is not a lot of time. 
 
 The first time I tried it, it was basically like having a bad case of *deja vu*. Everything was the same, everything was expected, everything was totally non-consequential. I was still in my bedroom, still listening to Sufjan Stevens, still sitting across from the dumb-looking hourglass. I had been there before. Nothing was surprising. I waited for something interesting to happen, but it never did. 
 
 And then, after maybe two minutes and fifty-five seconds, there was this weird pulsing flash and I was right back where I started -- holding the hourglass in my hand, just listening to the end of `` Chicago'' while trying to decide if I should turn the damned thing over. 
 
 Several more attempts confirmed it: unless my actions in the `` new past'' ( I have to call it that, or something; this is all fucking new ) led to me turning the hourglass in the last few seconds of those three minutes, it would spring me back to where I was and erase everything that happened. Time does not like to be fucked with, and the hourglass seems to be a bad lay to begin with. 
 
 It's very hard to do anything meaningful in three minutes. Believe me, I've tried. You can maybe win an eBay auction with a slightly lower bid. You can not get hit by a car. You can revise and revise your conversations so that you're brilliant rather than a damned fool. The problem is that you have to be doing all of these things already when you turn the goddamn hourglass ( three-minute-glass? ), and it can take a lot of doing to get you to those points. I sure managed to make *some* stuff happen, but three minutes is *not a lot of time*. None of it ended up being all that helpful, and the requirement that the last few seconds involve turning the hourglass anyway have created a really pressing obstacle. 
 
 The most disconcerting part of the whole experiment was where I tried to turn the thing after driving to a convenience store to buy a lottery ticket. I turned the glass and was then suddenly driving again without expecting it. I went off the road, crashed into a ravine, and started to burn alive. It hurts, in case you're wondering -- but it took more than three minutes to kill me, so I just ended up back where I started again. I'm never going to forget that feeling, though. I do n't know how anyone could. 
 
 Anyway, to cut a long story short, *fuck this hourglass*. Thirty minutes would have been workable; even ten would have given me *something*. As it is, I just want to chuck the thing into the nearest lake and be done with it. 
 
 In case you were counting, all of this took me exactly two minutes and fifty seconds to speak into the recorder. Time will only tell if
