I’ve been conducting a bunch of interviews lately for my next book. Some of them have been with people who are very busy. They really want to take part in the project—it’s just a matter of finding 15 minutes or so when they are free. I was supposed to one this afternoon and another one tomorrow.
The last thing I did before I left my home office this morning was check the phone. Ack! It wasn’t working. None of the phones in the house were. It’s VOIP, so I rebooted the modem. The phones came back. Then they went out again. Talk about stress. So, as a backup, I took my notes and everything I needed for the afternoon interview to work with me, in case I needed to use that as a fallback. I had everything set up to make sure I had no sound card conflicts. It took a while, but it was time well spent.
In the early afternoon, I got a text message saying I was about to get a phone call from my interview subject for tomorrow. The subject’s personal assistant said it was a case of now-or-never because of the subject’s schedule. I had my notes. I had my gadgets. All I had to do was push a button and away we went. I didn’t even have time to be nervous. Okay, I was nervous for a few seconds, but then I didn’t have time any more to be nervous. We were off and running. If the home phone hadn’t acted flaky, I wouldn’t have been nearly as ready for the interview and the panic level would have been exponentially greater. My wife tells me I’m blessed. I can’t argue. The material from this interview is gold. Gold, I say!
My Storytellers Unplugged essay tomorrow is more of a bloggy ramble. I was coming up blank for a topic, so I wrote about what was going on with me and it ended up connecting to some memories. The first line is, “I once put a Nobel Laureate to sleep.” But not in the veterinarian sense.
Another fine episode of Justified this week. Ava Crowder with a shotgun is a fearsome sight. And Boyd had the audience in the palm of his hand when he interrupted the debate. I was ready to vote for the new sheriff. The bit about the three women robbers was lightly lifted from Raylan. Most of the details were different, but you could tell they came from the same source. The teaser for next week looked great, with Quarles promising Raylan he was going to kill him on the street someday and Raylan shooting into the ceiling (maybe even into his own apartment?) saying, “Why wait?”
Unexpected happenings on Survivor, too. Why does it always happen that one team gets all the strong players when they shuffle the tribes? Moving them to separate beaches kind of negates the whole “one world” concept. I wonder if they did that because of the immunity idol swap last week, which could never have happened unless the two tribes were close to each other. I got a kick out of Tarzan, with his big vocabulary but short memory. It would have been funny for him to get to the voting station and then totally blank on whose name he was going to write.
