My new nod-cast.

I was sitting in my new home about two hours northeast of the City, smack-dab near the epicenter of Connecticut's Gingham Coast. My wife sat on the sofa adjacent to me. She had a Mac on her lap, another Mac to her right, had a pair of headphones blaring and was checking messages on her phone and looking dour.

I have a feeling if a modern-day Vesuvius struck the tri-state region, in two-thousand years or so when archeologists begin chipping away at the ensuing basalt, they will uncover millions of people who never saw the lava coming. They were too busy reading text messages.

This is life today. Made worse by the economy shrinking by one-third last month (400% greater than the steepest drop in the great recession.) And made worse because our nation has no social safety net.

Everyone is working. No one know how to stop, say no, or, frankly, even breathe.

In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me entirely if a good portion of our workforce doesn’t have some form or another of scoliosis—some type of spinal curvature from hunching over and staring all-day and night at too many badly punctuated pixels. All this makes me more than a little peeved. 

Though it was my wife who decided she wanted a home up here on the water and it’s been primarily the dint of my freelance labor that has permitted me to accrue the extra bone-crushing indebtedness a house supplies, I’m not 100% sure she’s looked up from her $15,000 of Apple devices long-enough to even see the sea. And seeing the sea was the point.

Of course, Yahweh, or whomever, got it right with the Apple. It’s way too much temptation not to eat of the Apple. Just ask Eve. Or my wife.

In any event, my iPhone rang and without much thinking about it, I picked it up.

“George,” said a cheerful voice. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a cheerful voice.

“This is he.”

“It’s Abner. We met about six months ago on LinkedIn. I wrote you a note.”

I let that sit there a bit.

“I get a lot of notes on LinkedIn, Abner. What’s this about?”

“No problem, George. I’ll just take a minute of your time. I’m working for a small content company and we’ll do all the work. We were wondering if you’d like to host a podcast.”

“I would have thought there were enough podcasts without me hosting one. It’s a podcast on advertising, I assume.”

“Well, kinda.”

“Kinda? I suppose it’s a podcast on podcasts about advertising.”

“Close. It’s a podcast about podcasts about advertising podcasts.”

“So we have a podcast about podcasts that talk about advertising podcasts?”

“Yeah! Cool. It’ll only take an hour of your time—and we have a syndication plan so we extend our reach,” he said.

“OK. I’ll give it a whirl,” I said, “there's enough of a market for a podcast on podcasts that talk about advertising podcasts?"

"Dude," he said, "we've done robust analytics."

"And...."

"People are time-pressed. They don't have time to listen to advertising podcasts--there are hundreds of them. And there are dozens of podcasts on advertising podcasts."

"Makes sense," I lied.

"But you'd have the only podcast on podcasts that talk about advertising podcasts. We're calling it the AddlePodded!"

"Sounds good, I suppose. I'm pretty busy though, how much does it pay?”

“Pay?” he answered, “it’s a podcast about podcasts that talk about advertising podcasts, it doesn’t pay anything."

"Nothing?"

"Let's not be ridiculous.” And he hung up the phone.

 aa