Lifestyle designer and time-management philosopher, Tim Ferriss, wasted a total of 3.82 seconds on Sunday evening, when he absent-mindedly glanced at a Calvin Klein billboard while on an errand.

“The Marina is ranked by my research team as THE most streamlined and efficient traffic-grid in North America. Its contra-rotating circuit patterns and direct lateral orbit synchronizations are second to none. See, what I do is rent an Electric Scooter online, pick it up at the end of my street, then ride it entirely downhill on Fillmore, turn it back in at the station at the bottom of hill, then take the bus back home. I don’t have to pay for the battery recharge,” said Ferriss. “But that’s where everything went wrong.”

The young, physically fit author says that on his way down the hill, he felt a sneeze coming on. He looked up at a 45 degree angle, pressing his tongue against the roof of his mouth in order to pacify the sternutatal nerve, a technique he learned while traveling the countryside by unicycle in India. “That’s when I saw the damned billboard and got totally distracted for a few seconds.”

He then missed his bus back up the hill, which departs from the corner of Fillmore & Chestnut between 4 and 5 seconds after he deposits his rent check into his landlord’s mail slot. He was then required to jog back up the hill without the aid of his Nike iPod Interface. On the way, he purchased a small package of unsalted peanuts, which slightly raised the density of Immunoglobin E in his blood, causing him to jog at a 6% deficiency.

Ferriss claims the delay in his return home over-humidified his apartment, causing a drop in oxygen levels in his personal rain-forest which decreased his handwriting speed by 4% over several days. He also cited an inability to focus on his book-on-tape Vietnamese language studies, missed his Kenpo class, and forgot to take his hourly hypodermic B12 supplement several times. He spent the rest of the evening depressed, shopping on Craigslist for exercise equipment, then fell asleep on the futon.

An elaborate chapter on the holistic health benefits of ignoring roadside billboards is featured in Ferriss’ new book, “The Twelve-Minute Errand,” which teaches entrepreneurs to speed-read street signs in over 20 languages, allowing anyone to filter out unnecessary information while engaged in time-critical daily missions.

“Even the most efficient time-management guru can make a mistake, I guess,” said Ferriss, in a press release written by his team of Personal Assistants, who were themselves on vacation in Qatar while subcontracting their work to a firm in Utah. “This has taken me weeks to recover from. Don’t make the same mistake I did.”

As restitution, Pre-Orders of Ferriss’ “Philosophy of Impatience” eBook are being offered at a 17.4% discount off the $1997 price if they purchased their tickets through Twitter at 7:46pm PST on March 29, which were the exact moments when Tim was too distracted to process orders completely efficiently via Skype on his iPhone.

Readers of Tim’s personal blog were disappointed.

“Your advice has taught me how to drink fourteen gallons of Starbucks Coffee in only one afternoon without getting sick, how to use NLP to cut in line at the restroom, and techniques for social engineering at the post office. Through one of your blog posts I even learned how to craft a crude Indonesian bow & arrow out of ordinary office supplies. I can’t believe I even wasted 32.48 seconds posting this comment.”

The above article was preemptively rejected by The Onion. For more stories from Beneath The Imaginary City, visit www.drzoltan.com.

Dr. Zoltan danced with heavy, stamping steps. His costume, which smelled like an attic full of old electronics gear, was made up of a large number of things… and clumsy. A dark, rough trenchcoat, head-to-toe cargo fatigues from some ancient intergalactic war, padded armor gloves, and a sturdy Swiss backpack purchased from Staples — all of these things gave him the appearance of wearing a cyber-punk-bio-mechanical exoskeleton. Not like a real one; more like a halloween costume. The most impressive element to the whole ensemble was the magenta and green lights flashing through the tangled milk-crate of Radio Shack wires connected to him. He checked them often, and would not have been seen in public this evening had they malfunctioned. 

This “life-support system” caused him great difficulty — of an amount considerably above normal — while moving at a speed faster than a walk. Would his glued-on beard fall off? He hoped not.

Tonight, he was running, but only in one particular portion of space. He felt off balance. Disoriented. It was becoming difficult to see in the dark while wearing fogged-up sunglasses. He considered cursing, conjuring up the memory of slang adolescent phrases he learned in a previous life.

His backstage passes flapped around the back of his neck and became tangled. Would he be permitted backstage if his laminates were facing the wrong direction? He hoped they would not become detached accidentally and fall to the ground. He directed his mind towards the possible actions he could take in such an emergency.

The skin on his face shed a few small drops of salty liquid that fell onto his shoes, which were square, uncomfortable, and full of sand. He had kept up this pace for the past two minutes, and was losing his patience. His equipment-filled backpack banged and rattled around like a vagabond bouncing down a staircase — a tumbling ball of limbs, kipple, and grocery cart.

The instructions in the manual said that if he ran at a steady gentle pace in this very specific, exact position for a full three minutes, a means of entrance or exit to another world would open. But this was anything but gentle. Dr. Zoltan wore far too much sci-tech weaponry for this much fancy foot-work. What if the coordinates were wrong?

He did not have much time. The rental car was due in an hour in San Francisco, and he abhorred paying late fees. He needed this “spell” to work, or he would become doomed. His credit card in this version of “reality” only had a $200 limit. One false move and he would be paying off the exponential fees to the Saudis for another two hundred years.

In a booming voice (pitched down a semi-tone with a Melodyne plug-in installed on his laptop) he pronounced, “This reality is one big pyramid scheme!” The overdose of oxygen he was experiencing momentarily re-contextualized what he was saying to himself. His mental record-player skipped as he considered the esoteric symbolism of the pyramid scheme and wondered if this was some sort of clue to the secret and hidden mysteries of the universe. But he had no resources to deploy as a means of accomplishing the results. 

He was quickly becoming drained of physical and mental resources, and did not bring any folded hand towels or bottled water with him. His d20 popped out of the side pocket of his backpack. His “Ultravision Future Goggles” were slipping down his face with increasing regularity. Tension. Terror. Panic. 

Dr. Zoltan is anything but a mouth breather, but his nostrils are too small to allow sufficient oxygen to pass through them under catastrophic stress. This mad dance inflamed the tissues in his computer-hacker leg muscles. In this mundane reality called American Capitalism, he was unable to activate his Hover Toggle — a device that had not been invented yet due to its non-marketability among the lower class. 

He made a vigorous and determined attempt to swat the bugs out of his mind and sustain his geosynchronous stomping for another 60 seconds. He failed and collapsed face-down in the seashells.

Join Dr. Zoltan on his next adventure Beneath The Imaginary City.