Context
The Helix Corporation is an evil mega-corporation where everything they make always has some sort of strange twist to it.
Their latest product was the Relativity Rocket Alarm Clock. It was supposed to be a normal alarm, but the device they created somehow ended up being a time machine. There's just one catch. It can only send people into the future, never into the past.
Here's how it works. There are four buttons on the machine, S for seconds, M for minutes, H for hours, and Snooze. There's no number pad so you have to manually press the buttons as many times as it takes to get to the number you want. If you want to go 5 seconds, 6 minutes, and 8 hours into the future, you have to press the S button 5 times, the M button 6 times, and the H button 8 times. There's no erase key either so there's no way to backpedal if you press the wrong pattern. Pressing Snooze activates the time travel, sending you forward in time, and only forward in time as far as was input.
When a person is time-traveling a 3-meter radius sphere of white light will erupt around the alarm clock and anything in that sphere will seem to disappear from the current timeline and reappear in the future at the input time. If the input was 5 seconds, 6 minutes, and 8 hours, then the person will travel exactly that far into the future and not a second later or sooner.
The biggest problem with the device is that you can only go forward, meaning that once you've used it there's really no way to go back. If you mistakenly type in the wrong time, you're particularly doomed because you might end up much farther in the future than you would want to be.
Also, they only have one machine and it disappears with the user until they reappear at their set time, so if they send a person 200 years into the future they will not be able to use the device until that person reappears in 200 years and someone hopefully recovers them.
Theoretically, there's no limit to how far into the future the device could send someone. It could send them to the end of time if they typed in the right number.
Geographical location does not change when the device is used. You will end up in the exact same latitudinal and longitudinal points before and after using the device.
The Question
What is one practical usage to being able to travel into the future without being able to travel back into the past?
As far as I can tell, the ability to only be able to go into the future would be an extremely useless ability, but there has to be a practical application for it that the main characters can take advantage of when they get in trouble.
Possible Solutions
1-It can be used as an emergency escape if the situation gets dire. If the main characters are cornered or the building is about to blow up, they can just go forward in time a day or two to avoid the brunt of the problem and appear fine a few days later.
2-Send a warning message into the future by sending an employee with the device to deliver the message. Seems like a waste of a perfectly good time machine but that's one way to do it.
Other than that I can see no practical uses for how a time machine with no backward direction would be useful. With no communication with the future then there is no way to coordinate a plan, which makes things difficult.
For all the person traveling into the future knows, they could be escaping one thing only to find out that the future is actually worse, which would defeat the purpose of going there in the first place. And a person delivering a message might find out that the future people already figured the problem out on their own so there was no point in warning them.
It just seems vastly impractical to have a time machine like this.
Final notes: -Time paradoxes are impossible with this type of machine because it's not making copies of anybody, just dropping an individual in the past into the future.
-There's no mass limit for what the time machine can bring but anything within the 3-meter radius will automatically be taken on the time trip. This includes inanimate objects and even the floor. If a person accidentally puts their arm outside the radius that arm will be neatly severed in half. The part that was inside the sphere will go to the future and the part outside stays in the past.
Edit:
-There is no cool-down period. -A human passenger is not required.