He almost ran into someone at the corner; she was waiting for the stop light and listening to her iPod in that way that displayed to all that she didn’t care too much about the rest of the world and preferred it leave her alone.

Some days, this obviously contrived apathy would have interested him. This wasn’t one of those days.

This was, however, one of those days. He rushed across the campus to the speech that he was supposed to be giving in (he checked his watch) negative three minutes.

He reached the auditorium seven minutes late, cursing under his breath. But as he approached the podium, he cast off the frustration and projected the image that everyone wanted to see. After all, they didn’t care about him as a person; they had come to see his work.

The speech, like so many speeches he had given before, and so many he would give again, took three hours but went very quickly for him.