Pretend that the year is 1914. Your name is Franz Urban, and you are the personal driver for Franz Ferdinand, the Archduke of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
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It's not a bad job, if you may say so yourself. Your proximity to the Archduke and his family allows you to have a taste of what it's like to be royalty; you can gloat to your friends that you are an exceptionally important person, since some of the most powerful people in the world are rendered helpless unless you're there to drive them where they need to be (for this, you can thank your mastery of one of those newfangled "automobile" thingies); you get to travel the world whenever the Archduke goes abroad with the rest of his entourage, eating its finest food and seeing its most spectacular sites free of charge; and heck, the pay ain't too shabby either. Sure, you may not own a salt mine or hobnob with the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, but your needs are met and your wants are reasonably accommodated. All in all, life is good.
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There is a catch, though. Because your boss is a member of the Habsburg aristocracy - and because the head of that royal family, Emperor Franz Joseph, runs the Austro-Hungarian Empire with an iron fist, keeping himself in power by forcing his multi-national subjects to involuntarily live under his regime and brutally crushing all separatist movements who stand in his way - there is always the chance that someone will try to (*ahem*) kill him.
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It's a shame, really, that Franz Ferdinand has been dragged into all of this, considering that he actually disagrees with his great-grandfather's repressive policies and has been an outspoken advocate of granting greater autonomy to each of the empire's many ethnic groups. Still, at the end of the day, he remains a loyal member of the noble family into which he was born. As such, he is associated with the totalitarianism of the Emperor, which means there will always be people who want him dead. That's why your job contains, among its many responsibilities, the instruction that you keep your eyes peeled for potential threats.
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When June 28, 1914 rolls around, you have this aspect of your mission in mind as you watch the angry mobs line your employer's motorcade while you drive through the Serbian capital of Sarajevo. You glance furtively at both sides of the street, seeing the angry faces being held back by police officers and trying to discern whether any of them are carrying more with them than a mere burning hatred of the Habsburgs. Things appear to be okay...
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GRENADE!!!!!!!!
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With a reflex so automatic that you surprise even yourself, you pull off a nifty evasive maneuver with your car, causing the grenade that has been thrown at it to bounce harmlessly off the back of the trunk (it does land on another car and explode there, killing two of its passengers, but that isn't your fault). Your instincts kick in and you quickly speed away from the scene. As the adrenaline rushes through your veins, you are vaguely aware of the Archduke shouting "So you welcome your guests with bombs!" at the crowds, who can hear him because the top of your car is down. Fortunately, you speed away before anyone else can react, and look behind you to make sure that the Archduke is safe. Once this has been confirmed, you settle down. There is other chattering going on in the backseat that you ignore.
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You have just changed the course of world history. Although you know that your actions have saved the Archduke's life, what you don't realize is that - if the assassination attempt had succeeded - his murder would have triggered a massive world war; that that world war would have ultimately taken fifteen million lives, caused the downfall of two powerful empires (the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire), contributed to the overthrow of the Russian czars and the rise of the Soviet Union as the world's first Communist superpower, and even helped spread a worldwide influenza epidemic (which killed another fifty million people); that after the war, the three remaining world powers - Great Britain, France, and America - would meet in Versailles to negotiate a peace treaty, and that while the American president, Woodrow Wilson, would attempt to create a liberal new world order (based on mercy toward the defeated countries, peace and mutual respect among all nations from that day forward, and the spreading of democracy wherever possible), his idealism would cause the other two world leaders (David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau) to make him into their bitch, divide the world up between themselves, and impose humiliating and costly punishments on Germany and the other losing countries; that one consequence of these decisions would be the downfall of Woodrow Wilson and his replacement with three consecutive right-wing presidents who, among other things, would do nothing as Wall Street engaged in irresponsible practices that caused a decade of dizzying prosperity followed by a worldwide depression; that another consequence of these decisions would be the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany; and that this in turn would cause a second world war, killing between fifty and seventy million people (not including the eleven million slaughtered in the Holocaust, more than half of them Jews), ending the reign of the old European empires and replacing them with America and the Soviet Union, and unleashing the atomic bomb and the horrors of potential global annihilation upon humanity.
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And that's just what would have happened before 1945.
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But you don't know any of that. What you do know is that your bad-ass automotive maneuverings just saved the Archduke's life. It's a good thing he had a sharp tack like you at the wheel, an individual who is always alert, always aware of your surroundings, always paying attention. A medal may be in your future. You're fantasizing about the parades that will be held in your honor, the newspaper headlines brandishing your name, the pay raise you will no doubt receive...
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"HEY! FRANZ!"
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You are rudely snapped out of your reverie. It seems that the chattering in the back of the car had been directed at you. The voice you now hear is that of General Oskar Potiorek, whose invitation had brought the Archduke to Sarajevo in the first place. General Potiorek is red-faced with anger; the Archduke doesn't notice any of this, since he is too busy worrying to his wife about the fate of the passengers in the car that did blow up.
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"What the hell are you doing? I told you to switch routes! Our original route was published in all the newspapers, so we need to take a different one in case other assassins are waiting for us along the way!"
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Whoops.
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"Sorry about that," you say as you slow down the car and begin to back up.
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"You need to listen!"
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"You're right. I'm very sorry."
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"Don't be sorry! Just get us out of here!"
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"Hey, you know, you could be a little more appreciative of the fact that I just saved your life."
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"I'd be more appreciative if you would just pay attention."
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That does it.
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"Hey, it's the fact that I was paying attention that saved our lives in the first place! Besides, do you really think that some assassin is waiting at this random cafe on this random corner on the off-chance that we happen to stop at this specific part of the road to do a K-turn..."
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You are cut off by the sound of bullets being fired at the Archduke from five feet away, ripping away a chunk of his neck.
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Apparently that guy who threw a grenade at the car had two accomplices, one of whom (19-year-old Gavrilo Princip) really did "just so happen" his way over to that particular cafe after the failed assassination attempt, where his embarrassment at having failed (and fear of being caught) was suddenly obliterated by his unexpected stroke of good luck.
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Well, it was good luck for him. It proved to be bad luck for you. And really, really shitty luck for the rest of humanity.
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See what happens when you stop paying attention?
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Of course, not all distractions have catastrophic consequences. Seventy years before these events – on February 28, 1844, to be exact –a young American man named William Waller decided, while partying on a boat called the USS Princeton, to impress his father-in-law by spontaneously bursting into song (history hasn’t recorded how much alcohol he consumed prior to making this decision). While we don’t know whether Waller’s musical display made the impression he was hoping for on his wife’s old man, it did catch his attention. This proved fortunate for both of them; right as William Waller reached the lyric in his song about how “Eight hundred men lay slain…”, the cannon on the ship’s deck – the one which Waller’s father-in-law had been about to walk upstairs to see before being unexpectedly detained by his daughter's beau– accidentally exploded, killing more than half a dozen men. Had it not been for Waller’s melodic outburst, there is little doubt that the man for whom he was showboating would have been among the dead.
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That man, incidentally, was President John Tyler, and had he been among the cannon’s fatalities that afternoon, it would have been the second time in less than three years that an American president had died in office; Tyler, having no vice president of his own (the 25th Amendment wouldn’t be passed for more than a century), would have been replaced by the Senate's president pro tempore, Willie P. Mangum; the defining mission of Tyler’s late presidency, to annex Texas into the Union, would have been abandoned my Mangum, who opposed that measure; because Mangum was a loyal Whig and a close ally of his party's powerful and ambitious leader, Senator Henry Clay, Mangum would have used his one-year presidency to enact the sweeping legislative program that Clay had been pushing for decades; this would have helped Henry Clay defeat James Polk in the 1844 presidential election, which he had lost in the "Tyler-had-lived" universe by an extremely close margin; Clay, unlike Polk, would not have waged a war of conquest against Mexico, which means we never would have acquired the states of California, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah, as well as large parts of Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico; the controversy over whether to permit slavery in the territories wouldn’t have occurred, thus postponing the Civil War by at least a decade; the famed 'Wild West' never would have existed; Texas would still be an independent republic to this day, with citizens probably even more obnoxious than they are now; our country would be smaller by more than 550,000 square miles; and, worst of all, with no state of California to produce hit movie franchises like Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings, our country’s massive population of nerds– lacking any retreat in the world of fiction from their pasty virginal existences – would be roving the streets in vicious gangs, burglarizing pharmacies for comic books and acne cream and cursing the name of Hayden Christensen for reasons they wouldn’t fully understand.
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Oh, and Mexico, because of its vastly greater size and access to bountiful petroleum reserves, would be an economic and military superpower, so much that they would be ranting incessantly about the need to build electric fences to keep those pesky Americans from illegally hopping the border.
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In short, the moral of these stories is this: Always pay attention when you’re driving a car, but it's okay to burst into song when you're on a ship.
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