Time Management
a half-hour dark comedy about time travel, self-discovery, and corporate malfeasance — created by CK Pahlow & David Singer
When an ambitious middle manager gets sent back in time three years to commit corporate espionage, he seizes the opportunity to repair his own fucked-up life.
Live reading
at Austin Film Festival 2022
Saturday October 29, 6:15pm
St. David’s Episcopal Church
Short Synopsis
If you could go back and re-do the three years of your life you screwed up the most, wouldn’t you? And what would you change?
2026: The giant ORCA corporation sends an ambitious middle-manager back in time for a top secret mission. But it’s not to kill Hitler — they're sending Joe back a measly three years to complete “administrative” work. And while he’s in the past shredding documents and purchasing chicken farms, he sees his old life clearly for the first time — including the marriage his old self is about to ruin. Joe decides to grab the future he thinks he deserves, even if that means drugging, kidnapping, and taking the place of the other Joe to do it.
The ORCA Guide to
Space-Time Delivery
It’s 2025. The multinational ORCA corporation has uncovered the secret to time travel. Don’t worry too much about how it works. It’s not even clear how well they understand it themselves. But one thing they DO understand: rewriting history could be very profitable.
The biggest catch: once you’re back, you’re staying back. The technology to send people FORWARD in time hasn’t been figured out yet. They’re not sure what happens if you run into yourself. Insanity? A black hole? Irritable bowel syndrome?
They figure it’s safer to take you off the board until the time loop is closed. So you’ll wait out the intervening years sequestered in the Winnipeg office, communicating with your bosses via the only known method of penetrating the space-time continuum: the trusty T-Mobile Sidekick.
Sure, there’s risks. The first few “Time Managers” ended up really far back in time. Like, in-the-middle-ages back in time. And the “where” has been something of a mixed bag too — an unfortunate Labradoodle named Coco is currently still orbiting the Earth.
But as they say around ORCA HQ, “mistakes are for learning, not repeating.”
Season One
It’s 2026. JOE (33) is an ambitious middle-manager at tech behemoth ORCA, whose dreams of executive bathrooms and decadent expense accounts are circling the drain. His early-onset mid-life crisis has also recently ruined his marriage to FIONA (30). They’re still close, but she’d finally had enough of his bullshit and divorced him. He’s going nowhere, and he knows it.
But when Joe gets called into a meeting with his boss’s boss’s boss, KIMBERLY (50), she drops a bomb. They’ve invented time travel, and they want to send him back. Joe has some questions. “I mean... I never thought I could kill anyone. But... Hitler?” She assures him it’s nothing that dramatic, it’s purely “administrative”. But there is one catch — they don’t know how to send people forward in time yet, and they can’t have two Joes running around Austin, so he’ll have to wait out three years at the ORCA office in Winnipeg until the time loop closes. As long as he avoids running into the Joe from 2023 — let’s call him OLD JOE — it should be a piece of cake and he’ll be on his way to the executive salad bar. Ultimately Joe decides it’s less terrifying than spending the next 20 years as a cubicle jockey — and in a blast of intense pink light, he zooms back to 2023.
But while he’s there shredding documents and cornering the the radish market in the tri-county area, his curiosity gets the better of him and he can’t help but secretly look in on Fiona — who he still loves very deeply — and his glimpse at his former life makes him realize:
I’m an idiot. I didn’t appreciate how good I had it.
So he comes up with an audacious plan — he waits until Fiona’s at work, knocks on his old front door, plunges a syringe into OLD JOE’s neck, stashes him in a closet, and NEW JOE takes over OLD JOE’s existence. It’s a victimless crime — he’s literally doing it to himself.
So, NEW JOE takes over OLD JOE’s life, and he’s determined to fix everything he screwed up in the last three years, especially his marriage.
Fiona doesn’t totally recognize this new, agreeable version of her husband — What happened to that sullen prick I was married to last week? But he is more pleasant to be around.
Joe furiously juggles keeping his bosses in the future happy, Fiona happy, and his old self zonked out on prescription meds in the basement closet. It’s all gravy until Fiona comes home one night to find a naked and incoherent Joe on the living room rug. The audience knows what she doesn’t: this is OLD JOE, who’s half-woken from his drug coma and managed to escape. New Joe spies Fiona sobbing as the paramedics load Old Joe into an ambulance. Without a home base, Joe’s plans are dead in the water — both the espionage for ORCA and repairing his marriage. Ultimately seeing no other option, he rings the doorbell and — once Fiona’s recovered from the shock — explains that he’s Joe from the future, and that he has serious business to do… conveniently leaving out the big news that sometime in the next few months the two of them are gonna get divorced.
She’s half relieved — “I knew I wasn’t crazy!” — and half terrified. New Joe insists they’ve gotta take Old Joe off the board or his top-secret mission will be compromised — and the only way to do that is to put him in rehab. Fiona balks — but ultimately she agrees to put a very confused and contrite Old Joe into rehab for a little while. Old Joe can’t explain how the drugs got into his system, he’s scared and more than a little addled, but he agrees to go.
So New Joe — with his ally Fiona — continues to follow the instructions that Kimberly sends from the future. The tasks are bizarre and inscrutable — buy a Kentucky alpaca farm; blackmail a parking meter attendant; rig a local election. Fiona seems to be the only one asking the question: What’s ORCA actually trying to achieve with all this madness? And how will it affect the future?
Back in rehab, Old Joe’s brain is getting less foggy and more suspicious: This is bullshit. I don’t do hard drugs. Is Fiona cheating on me? Angry and despondent, he breaks out of rehab and begins traveling across the country to save his marriage. It’s ORCA’s nightmare scenario — there are now TWO Joes running around.
Eventually, Kimberly’s ever-more ludicrous missions land New Joe and Fiona in Honduras. She wants them to support a government-affiliated paramilitary unit in stealing land from a band of rebels. But Fiona and New Joe have begun to understand that the company’s motives are deeply sinister, and they start to undermine what they are being told to do, working to thwart ORCA’s plan tosecure a monopoly on the rare mineral needed to make the pink time travel goo.
On the run to save his marriage, Old Joe follows his credit card charges to a small hotel in Honduras, where he confronts Fiona: What’s going on? Who are you here with? Are you breaking up with me? Fiona hates to see Old Joe in agony, but she knows she has to protect New Joe and the mission that may determine the fate of the world. So as much as it pains her, she sends Old Joe packing. He heads to the airport, miserable and alone.
Meanwhile in 2026, Kimberly realizes that New Joe is betraying her. With her career on the line, she needs an ally in 2023 who will complete the mission. Someone loyal to the company who would do anything to get ahead.
You guessed it. OLD JOE.
Kimberly spins an elaborate tale of revenge, promising wealth, power, and a spot in the Executive Parking Lot. Old Joe doesn’t need much convincing, and swears to make the company proud.
So the season builds to a climax in the jungles of Honduras, with NEW JOE and FIONA in existential battle with OLD JOE. The season builds to a climax as Old Joe and New Joe fight it out in the jungle, Old Joe finally cracking after everything he’s been put through — “You can’t kill me, motherfucker! Or you won’t exist!” He roars with insane laughter as New Joe and Fiona scurry away in retreat. They’ve lost the battle, but they vow to continue fighting the war — they’ll find a way to take down ORCA’s mission for world domination, together.
Back in 2026, the world looks very different from what we saw in the first episode. The ORCA brand is almost everywhere. ORCA hospitals, ORCA gas stations, The ORCA Supreme Court™. And the company’s apparently still not satisfied. Kimberly and a shadowy figure watch in glee as an entire warehouse filled with naked operatives march through a futuristic gate dribbling a sheet of pink goo like the arch of a malfunctioning carwash. Kimberly turns to the shadowy figure — the architect behind everything we’ve seen — “Are you sure we shouldn’t just take him off the board, sir?” The figure turns to her and we see — IT’S JOE. A third version of him — older and grizzled. “It’s not checkers, Kimmy. It’s Monopoly.”
Staff Directory
NEW JOE
Age: 35
Education: BA in Business Administration, Baylor University
Work History: 8 years in Asset Reallocation, ORCA. 2 years Assistant Manager, Waffle House.
Achievements: Sentinel in ORCA’s Top Secret Time Travel Operation
Inspirational Quote: "Never give up. Keep trying and pushing and struggling, even if you don't know what your goal is or why you would want to achieve it." - Jack Handey
Myers Briggs: INTJ — “Architect”
OLD JOE
Age: 32
Education: BA in Business Administration, Baylor University
Work History: 5 years in Asset Reallocation, ORCA. 2 years Assistant Manager, Waffle House.
Achievements: Saved ORCA $163k by suggesting three people be “deallocated”.
Inspirational Quote: “I never dreamed about success. I worked for it.” — Estée Lauder
Myers Briggs: ENTP - “The Debater”
FIONA
Age: 29
Education: BA in Speech Communications, Texas Tech. Yoga Instructor Certification, SweatCore
Work History: 3 years Assistant Manager, Ladybug Wellness Center. 2 years Yoga Instructor. Admin Asst., Schermerhorn Realty.
Achievements: 2,136 Instagram Followers.
Inspirational Quote: “I am in charge of how I feel and today I am choosing happiness” — Blogilates
Myers Briggs: ISFJ — “Defender”
KIMBERLY
Age: 48
Education: Masters in Business Analytics, Duke University. PhD in Supply Chain Logistics, MIT.
Work History: 12 Years Director of Logistics, Lockheed Martin. 10 Years VP Research & Development, ORCA.
Achievements: Henry Ford Worker Relations Award, Haymarket Medal.
Inspirational Quote: “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
Myers Briggs: ESTJ — “Executive”
EUGENE
Age: 45
Education: Associates Degree in Business, Roy Cohn Junior College.
Work History: [Redacted]
Achievements: [Redacted] and Best Yard, Austin Garden Walk 2018-21.
Inspirational Quote: “Plans are worthless. Planning is essential.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
Myers Briggs: INTP — “Logician”