It’s not that i don’t have a sense of my own future, it’s just that I have a tough time picturing the reality of an individual day if it’s more than, say, three months away. If you want to get me to agree to do something I really don’t want to do or go someplace I really don’t want to go, just ask me six months ahead of time. Six months off seems like a hundred years when your workdays are systematically dissected by highly skilled executive assistants, then carefully reassembled to squeeze the daylights out of every single available minute.

That’s how they got me to agree to come here. I’m one in a panel of speakers trapped in one of those cheap, stuffy, windowless hotel meeting rooms half listening to a presentation that’s about as deep as a place mat on the value of a highly structured personal development plan. It’s so boring it’s making my hair hurt. Glassy-eyed, I daydream that I can hear the scrape and clank of the cogs in my head.

Scattered throughout the dusty and cluttered corners of my poorly tuned brain are millions of worthless tidbits of information that come seeping to the surface unbidden and unwelcome, especially at times like this, with greater clarity and detail and more easily remembered than my children’s birthdays. Somewhere along the way I learned that because of its limited storage capacity, a goldfish’s brain can only remember what has happened during the past 30 seconds. If that’s true, that means that if the goldfish is hungry, as far as it knows, it’s been hungry its whole life. If it’s frightened, it’s been frightened its whole life. Or happy, or sad, or tired, or confused, or...oh God! I’m bored.

The guy presenting has a voice like a strangled soprano, with the whiny metallic resonance of an electric coffee grinder. But what he lacks in compelling, relevant content he more than makes up for in attitude. You see, Torquemada here has written a book, one of those overpriced hardcover pamphlets that play to the insecurities of middle managers (desperate to make it to upper middle management) by rehashing someone else’s well-described and proven ideas into simpering platitudes and numbered lists: "Twelve ways to maximize the effectiveness of your most self-destructive habits."

There are a few things in life that ought to be avoided at all costs, including prison, user conventions in Buffalo, N.Y., the Ice Capades (unless you’re in Buffalo) and books like the one that this clown is plugging. Thousands of books on business techniques ghostwritten for Michael Dell, Bill Gates or Donald Trump, screeds on paradigm shifts and breaking what’s not broken by technology gurus, and pop psychology thrillers about this or that most-effective-yet-annoying personality trait sit on every shelf and every credenza in every executive suite in America. These tomes are proudly displayed, often quoted, rarely read, and chock-full of ideas about as original as the Mona Lisa on black velvet. I have at least one of these for every year I’ve been a manager, sent to me by one boss or another who was deluded enough to think that number one, I’d actually take time to read it and number two, it would do me any good if I did.