How I Learned to Tolerate Vegemite

It began a few days after I’d settled into my internship.

“Hey,” Cynthia said to me one morning, striding past the office’s chrome and glass furnishings. Her elbow brushed against some of the clutter and knocked it to the floor. She didn’t notice. “Take a break from filing those things. I need you to ride shotgun with me. We’re dropping off the Anton case files to a client on St. Mick’s Street.”

I hesitated before replying. “ . . . Did you mean Hartsfield Boulevard?” Two years had passed since the construction, but a lot of people still called the area by its old name.

Cynthia brushed aside her thin, dark hair and gave me a cool look. “St. Mick’s, Eliza, St. Mick’s. The client is Mrs. Tian Keretsford, located at 32 St. Mick’s Street, two years five months twenty-three days and seven hours ago.”

I wriggled the manila folder in my hand uneasily, unsure how to respond to this seemingly insane statement.

•

“Oh for gawd’s sake, Cynthia, stop messing with new intern.” Tim wandered into the room, eating animal crackers and cheerfully spilling crumbs everywhere.

I liked Tim more than Cynthia. Tim was actually normal. Let me give an example, by describing the very first day of work. When I stepped through the doors, I supposed I gave some intern-ish aura with my newly-bought business-casual outfit. Because the moment Cynthia saw me, she immediately put a book in my hand and began giving convoluted instructions on where to file it away. Then, in the middle of her instructions, she wandered off. All I could do was stand there helplessly.

But then Tim came to my rescue.

Late middle-aged and comfortably chubby, he warmly introduced himself. He asked my name and what year in school I was, and showed me around the facility while letting me meet the staff. Then he paused by an orange bookshelf. Tim explained: that was where Cynthia meant for me to put the book. Then, much to my relief, he started quietly laughing about Cynthia. See, isn’t Tim nice?

Which is why I really thought Tim had come to my rescue again, when he poked his head into the archive room and chided Cynthia. But then he kept going.

“Besides not giving any explanation, Cynth,” Tim said, “you haven’t even fetched rations of Mitim.”

“I already ate some for lunch,” she replied, a tad defensively. “I always eat some for lunch.”

“All right, you ate the Mitim. What about Eliza?”

Oh, Tim, I thought, where are you when I’m not at my internship, to help me with the world’s Cynthias? Granted, I still didn’t understand what Tim was talking about. So I waved at him in a confused way.

“Oh,” explained Tim, noticing my gesture, “Cynthia’s personally delivering a case file to a client. The client is located across town and about two years in the past, so she’s using the company time machine.”

– What? Tim! I thought you were on my side!

•

It looked like a giant jellybean, with ferns sprouting out of it. Clearly, it was a modern art display. Or oversized new age furniture, which was supposed to show qualities in tune with nature. Maybe.

“So there’s the time machine,” said Tim, sweeping his arm towards the fern-covered giant furniture, as we finished making our way into the lab. Tim was still not helping the situation. “And here, Elisa, is the Mitim.” Tim handed me a little paper cup like you see in McDonald’s for ketchup.

I looked inside, and there was a generous dollop of some thick-looking red paste. I wafted the scent with my hand, as chemists do. It wasn’t ketchup. I prodded at the stuff with my pinky, and found it had a texture like peanut butter. I tentatively licked my pinkie.

“Tim,” I said.

“Yes?”

“This tastes like Vegemite.”

Cythnia, nearby, shrugged and gave a wave of her hand that suggested, Just eat it already.

“We’re working on that,” apologized Tim. “Cynthia may be fine with what she invented ten years ago, when we were just starting up. But the company’s expanded since then, and it’s really taking too long for new staff to acquire the taste of Mitim. Still – in the meantime – ” Tim began rooting around in the pantry behind him, “ – you can spread the paste on some toast with butter and gobble it down that way, if you’d like.”

“Tim,” I said. “I think you put red food dye in Vegemite and gave it to me.”

“Ah, I cherish that bluntness of yours, Eliza! You know, for instance, that you are the only intern who has been able put up with Cynthia for this long? But no, no, the stuff you hold has a distinctly nutty taste, compared to Vegemite. More importantly, Mitim will ward off any time travel nausea. And, can you believe it, Mitim is additionally nutritious and good for your health!” Tim continued to ramble. “Even Oscar’s taken to eating some at lunchtime, have you noticed? – Ah, found it. Here!”

Tim tossed me a bag of pre-sliced oatmeal bread from the Stop and Shop grocery store across the street. The plastic bag had a “buy two get one free” sticker on it.

Eyeing the red Vegemite, I reasoned Tim was too nice to feed me anything poisonous. Plus, come to think, I had seen Cynthia eating the stuff on toast every day for lunch. So I finally ate the Vegemite. It was still gross and salty.

I was prodding at the ferns on said time machine, wondering what on Earth they did. Tim, watching me, commented, “We really need to trim those down again…. Oh! Eliza, that’s a project you can do when you get back.”

And, I am sorry to report, most of time traveling was just as anticlimactic as Tim’s comment.

All right, I guess the inside of the fern-covered art-scultpure of a machine was pretty sweet. Cynthia, being Cynthia, didn’t want to bother with an airplane cockpit of buttons and screens. So she created an intuitive holo-display where one pointed at a picture of what one wanted to operate the time machine. Of course, I’m just guessing that Cynthia is the one behind the design. It would follow, though, from what I’d seen of her so far – develop an ingenious machine-passenger interface because she hated knobs and levers, but don’t bother changing the god-awful tasting Vegemite paste since it didn’t personally bother her.

But like I said, the inside of the modern-art-sculpture time machine was the most interesting part of the trip.

Because when we actually traveled back two years five months whatever Cynthia had said, I stepped out… and couldn’t tell the difference.

Yes, it looked like twisty old St. Mick’s Street, I’ll give it that. And maybe the leaves on the trees didn’t look the same as when I walked to my internship this morning. Perhaps the wind carried a different smell, too. But I was looking for grander signs. Of course, I didn’t really have time for close observations: Cynthia finished soon enough and came striding back. She was hustling for the return trip and not the least bit interested in letting me absorb my first time traveling experience.

But as it turned out, I would be going on many more time travel trips during the spell of my internship.

Something about the design of the machine meant that having two minds on board stabilized time travel exponentially. The regular staff was busy with running the company in the present, so the interns were generally chosen to ride along with the time traveler. And among those who knew how to operate the time machine, Cynthia was the best. So despite everything, she often did the time-traveling errands.

And (as Tim said) I was the only intern who could even begin putting up with Cynthia. Thus, without fail, I was the one called to ride shotgun with her.

•

As time passed – and I mean, in the present sense, with my internship progressing – I eventually started to understand Cynthia. She was like me. Blunt, yet vaguely absent minded. Except to an insane degree, in Cynthia’s version. (*)

Despite such thoughts, I think Cynthia and I began to feel a mutual acceptance of each other. On the last day of my internship, she let me have a joy ride through time.

I saw Proterozoic oceans, a Maiasaur tending to her young, a greyback and a bluebelly soldier secretly meeting to trade tobacco and coffee, a gentleman and a lady in the streets arguing over “The Origin of Species,” a view of a bustling, living Machu Picchu – and finally, two hominid looking creatures, stepping through soft muddy ground, one pausing to give a hesitant look back at the horizon. In other words, all the things I had always wanted to see.

Don’t tell anyone, but that joy ride was the first time I actually began to accept the whole time travel business. Up until then, most of the time travel was limited between three months to seven years in the past, and for company purposes. The range of what I saw just didn’t convince me.

But the real root of my disbelief was…

The Vegemite.

I ate the gross stuff each and every time I went on a time trip, especially after I forgot once and came back with my head spinning for a good half an hour. Despite all that, you’d think I’d link Vegemite with somewhat novel time traveling errands, and thus form a positive association.

But honestly, I never acquired the taste of Vegemite. I just learned to tolerate it.

If eating salty Vegemite (spread on toast) had not been introduced as a crucial factor of time traveling company errands, I might have taken time travel seriously a lot sooner.

How I

Learned

“How I Learned to Tolerate Vegemite”

I was working part time in an internship. They paid me a meager stipend, more for appearances than anything. But they did promise me free lunches and rides in the company vehicle. And in the interview, they said that interesting things happened in the company. By “interesting,” well, I’d know more as time passed. And that is where the Vegemite comes in.

I’m sure you all know what Vegemite is? Sort of a brownish, yeast-based paste stuff that is apparently very healthy for you. I think it comes from Australia, and seems to be popular in that area of the world. Mind you, my internship doesn’t take place in New Zealand or Australia, but one way or another there was still Vegemite involved.

(*) I hope this doesn’t mean I will become like Cynthia, as I grow older.

One final item of importance, sort of.

On my last day, Tim gave me a sample of the new time travel Vegemite he was working on. Incidentally, he’s the only one who calls it by the actual name of Mitim. Anyway, the new paste was still Vegemite in essence, but there was a strong flavor of strawberries now. It was a dried fruitbar sort of palpability, and absolute heaven compared to the original flavor.

I was annoyed that Tim was introducing this new strawberry-flavor time travel Vegemite after my internship had ended. But he’s such a nice guy that, eventually, I forgave him.

END

Vegemite

to Tolerate