Episode 8: Tuesday Cost Me $147

SPEAKER_01 0:01

If you've ever canceled plans because you already took your shoes off, you've come to the right place. Say hello to Drain Battery Society host Peter Conway, a man whose social battery has a charge measured in minutes and quite possibly even seconds.

Cold Open: The Parking Lot Constitution

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There are very few places in America where otherwise civilized adults abandon every social norm faster than a parking lot. It's like once you leave the public road and turn between two rows of parked cars, the social norms no longer apply. Speed limits become suggestions. Turn signals become optional. And the conventional wisdom is that the person backing out of a parking space should possess the awareness of a fighter pilot. I'm the guy who backs into almost every parking spot I've ever entered, but I've backed out of enough parking spaces to know there's a very specific moment where you simply surrender. You inch back, stop, look left, look right, look left again. Lean forward, even though that changes absolutely nothing. You probably turn the radio down so you can see better. Eventually, you just commit and hope the backup camera is having a better day than you are. And then somebody appears. Always. Not driving, walking. Directly behind your vehicle. Not because they need to, but because to them the safest place to take a leisurely stroll is inside the blind spot of a reversing vehicle. These are the same people who think the white lines in the crosswalk are some sort of protective force field. So once you start backing up, they give you the look. You know the one. Like you interrupted their afternoon. Parking spaces themselves are a whole other mystery. Nobody parks in the first available spot. Well, nobody except me. We all drive around looking for one that's just better than the first one, right? Not closer, better. One with shade or no shopping carts, or one where nobody's parked on either side because vehicular isolation is my prime motivation. I've become the kind of person who will happily walk another hundred yards if it means I don't have to squeeze out of my truck like it's a submarine escape hatch. And don't even get me started on the people who wait. You know the ones. You're walking in the general direction of your vehicle, and suddenly someone is sitting there with their blinker on, just watching you. Now I'm under pressure. They're watching every move I make, trying to figure out if I'm actually leaving or just rearranging the wrappers and the cup holders. All the while they're scanning for another vehicle trying to steal the space they've already mentally claimed. And I haven't even committed to leaving yet. Maybe I need to answer a text, pick a podcast, maybe even write one, adjust the mirrors. Might even take the time to reconsider every decision that brought me to this parking lot. But now I have an audience. So naturally, I take longer. Look at me, other driver. I am the captain now. I'm kidding. It's not on purpose. I just don't perform well under observation, which is ironic because ten minutes earlier, I was the guy waiting with his blinker on. Welcome to the Drain Battery Society. Barely charged, fully opinionated.

Welcome & Battery Check

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Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea. I am your host, Peter Conway, and I am here to kiss your boo-boo. Really, I'm here to help you feel understood, to talk about the things we all remember, to help you feel a little less crazy. Try to remember, I am no substitute for a good therapist. Or really even a bad therapist. We usually start with a battery check here, and today shouldn't be any different than any other day because at this age they all run together and feel the same. My battery's sitting at about forty-nine percent. You're probably wondering why not fifty percent. It's because I don't give anything away for free. You've got to earn it. It was kind of a hoity toity weekend this weekend, filled with a historical society event followed by dinner, and a craft fair, also followed by dinner. I'm sensing a pattern. But I digress and I weigh more. These weren't just any crafts. These were the best New Hampshire has to offer, and I'm not even kidding. If you get a chance to go to a League of New Hampshire craftsman space, take it. The stuff there was mind-blowing. Woodworking, pottery, leather, art, you name it. Initially I felt like a hack, which I am, until I remembered some of these people have been doing this for 50 years. As any good junior senior citizen would on a hot day with a lot of walking, I wore my recovery sandals and brought my sneakers. Surprisingly, I lasted well past my normal shelf life at things like that. Never even had to get the sneakers out of the car. We found another great place to eat in a small town that, by rights, should only have one restaurant called Jimmy's Hole in the Wall Diner. As it would happen, it's the second great restaurant in the town. We ate at the other a few years ago, and it turns out they were only a few miles apart, which, you know, kind of blew my mind. Sunday was spent lounging after a quick out for breakfast, so why is the battery only at 49%? Because I've been wearing old man cologne since Saturday. My neck is stiff and sore, my trapezius is hard as a rock, and now the pain is starting to stretch down into my bicep. I've put more roll on Tylenol onto these areas than I care to admit, and it still hurts. In case you missed it, the Tylenol Rollon Cream is the old man cologne. And I go through about a tube of that stuff every month. They should be the first actual sponsor we have now that I think about it. And speaking of sponsors, today's masterpiece is sponsored by Joint Venture Arthritis Cream. Snap, Crackle, and Pop should be the exclusive domain of breakfast cereal. Why should your knees be the loudest thing in the room? Joint Venture goes on smoothly and smells like your grandparents' medicine cabinet. That's how you know it's working. In clinical trials, Joint Venture Arthritis Cream helped people stand up without sounding like microwave popcorn a full 43% of the time. Pick up a tube of Joint Venture Arthritis Cream today at your local pharmacy.

This Week's Main Topic

SPEAKER_01 6:44

We like easy, don't we? So much so that we've spent every waking minute since the invention of the microwave removing friction from our lives. Everything has to be faster, automatic, delivered, remembered for us, recommended for us, and available immediately. I'm guilty of it myself with this podcast with the recharge recommendation, right? I'm still upset paying what I do for Amazon Prime when I can't get next day delivery on everything anymore. I'd write a sternly worded letter, but I need flossers and I don't want to leave the house for 'em. Anyway, easy isn't always better, which is easy to say, right? I'm starting to wonder though if maybe the friction we'd run up against was what made things so good back then. Think about music in that light. We'd hear a song on the radio, maybe on American Top Forty with Casey Kasim on a Saturday morning. We'd have to get a ride to the mall or the record store to buy the entire ten or twelve song album. And then once we got it home, we'd tear the shrink wrap off if we hadn't already, read the liner notes and lyrics while we played it the first time, and then we played it again so we could actually listen because we'd memorize the lyrics on the first try. Friends, it was a magical time, was it not? And now we can sign up for Apple Music free with a Verizon Cell Plan and get any song we want in less than ten seconds. No liner notes, no album art, no anticipation. Ten seconds after we think of the song, it's playing, which is both incredible and somehow far less exciting. Photography. We'd have to buy rolls of film. I I can't even remember where we got them. We'd have to load it in the camera, wind the film, pop the flash tower into the top of the camera if we had that kind of camera. I had one of those flat Kodaks, I forget what they were called. They were, I don't know, like an inch thick and and probably about six, seven inches long. That took the tower. I had others like the the the more traditional square, rectangle, boxy things that took the singular flash cube with four flashes on it. Anyway, regardless of what we did with the flash, we got 24 tries to take a good picture, but had to wait two weeks to find out whether we were successful. Now, I have more than 15,000 pictures in my photo library. I can add effects or erase people instantly and never know the pain of having to unwind the film manually and send the role in to get developed. Well, of course I know the pain. I I, you know, was there. Uh but but man oh man, uh the joy that at least I experienced when those pictures would come back. It was the best. And how about travel? We'd have to call someone on the landline to get directions. Things like take a left where the old van used to be. It burned in 65, but you can still see a few black sticks left if the sun's just right. It sounds impossible, but we'd get there. We had folding maps in the glove box, we'd have a human navigator to read and translate the map, or we'd have to pull over to get our bearings if we were driving solo. If we wrote the directions down from the call that we had to make to get the directions, was on the back of an envelope, so we just popped the envelope into our pocket. We hoped. If we got out on the road and forgot the envelope, God help us. If you were rich, though, forget the envelope, your family had an honest to goodness notepad right there by the phone. Either way, getting lost wasn't a failure of technology like it is now. It was just a part of going somewhere. When you called somebody's house, you would have absolutely no idea who was going to answer, and it didn't matter which end of the call you were on. Everybody was guessing. Nobody knew anything. It was a total crapshoot. You'd have to know the voice of the person you were calling or wait for the person who answered to go get them. You're really at their mercy. It's practically a hostage negotiation to someone who's nineteen now, I'm sure. The thing is, we used to actually have to talk to people without first negotiating the call by text. It wasn't hard. It was normal, everyday life. And let's talk about cash. I'm not talking about cash being better. I'm talking about being able to physically see how much money you had by opening your wallet rather than logging in. Back then, if twenty bucks disappeared from my wallet, I was getting the FBI involved. Quite different than tapping on my watch and finding out three days after the fact that Tuesday cost me 147 bucks. We talked the other week about information overload. I used to go outside first thing in the morning to grab the newspaper, sometimes out of the snowbank. I was like Tony Soprano with a trapper keeper. Google it, kids. Anyway, the newspaper was great, not because the journalism was superior, which it was, but because you could actually finish the news. It's a fantastic distinction. There was an actual last page. You could read it like the summit of Everest. And once you did, you knew everything that happened yesterday. And then you get told to go mow the lawn. Hopefully not during the winter. Anyway, today's 24-hour news cycle is deliberately bottomless. I can scroll all day long if I want to. I can leave it on CNN and watch the same story 25 times, presented 27 different ways. It's ridiculous. Living an analog life was at its core all about waiting rather than instant gratification. We waited to buy music, even if we ordered it from RCA or Columbia House. We communicated with letters, even with friends one town over. We waited for video, and once it was once it was invented and available, we had to wait sometimes for weeks to be able to see a movie if someone else had rented it first. And don't get me started on the Christmas catalogs from Sears, JC Penny, and eventually Service Merchandise, Montgomery Ward, all the biggies. You could order through the mail, I think. But you know, the best part was knowing that the store carried it if it was in the catalog. And we had layaway if you didn't have a hundred bucks on you that day. So now that I think about it, layaway was like analog credit. Anticipation was the real emotion, and the dominant one to most kids. Now we have your package is eight stops away and we're upset that it's not closer. What are these people doing with their day? Look, I'm not advocating a move to an Amish paradise. I'm not telling you that you have to throw out your iPhone or you'll throw it in a river, whatever. I'm just saying maybe analog life in the digital age isn't about getting rid of technology. Maybe it's about choosing not to use it. Keep your phone in your pocket a little longer. Resist the urge to use it for every damn part of your day. Easier said than done, I know. Go to a concert and watch and listen to the actual show instead of recording it. I was at a Rick Springfield show a few years ago and I had to go to the bathroom, and when I returned, he was going into Jesse's girl. So I stayed in the walkway and watched, and of course, you know, like any red-blooded American, I would hope. I couldn't help but sing along, as one does for Jessie's girl. There was a Karen on the other side of the wall telling me to shut my mouth because she was recording. I will not grace you with my reply. You can use your imagination. Leave your phone in your pocket. Give yourself absolutely nothing to accomplish and nothing to photograph. Nobody even needs to know you're there. That's analog living. And that brings us to today's Drain Battery Society Universal Truth No. 114. Convenience saves time. We just haven't figured out what we're supposed to do with all the time it saved. I got to thinking the other day, if our entire life were laid out like a roll of film, we'd all know somebody who would find the two pictures where nobody's smiling and decide we lived a miserable life. But back up a little. Look at the whole role. Smiles, frowns, laughter, tears, good days and shitty ones. Back up far enough and maybe you realize that overall it it's been a pretty good life. I'll give you a moment to dry your eyes. Look, I'm not being nostalgic for inconvenience. I don't want you to get the wrong idea. I am nostalgic for intentionality. We had to choose the record. We had to make the phone call. We had to take the photograph, write the letter, and go to the store. We had to remember the directions and wait for the package. And because those things required a commitment from us, they meant more. Maybe that's what I miss about analog life. Not that things were harder. I miss having to participate. I know exactly what technology can do. I'm just no longer convinced I want it doing everything for me.

Commercials

SPEAKER_01 16:00

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SPEAKER_00 16:35

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Nobody Needed This

SPEAKER_01 17:05

And now back to the Drain Battery Society. This is the part of the show where we recognize the innovators among us, the visionaries who look at an everyday object that's worked perfectly well for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and ask the question nobody else had the courage to ask. But what if it had Bluetooth? It's time for nobody needed this. Today I want to talk about the I can't even say it with a straight face. I want to talk about the Bluetooth hairbrush. I can barely say it. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I haven't personally needed a hairbrush in more than 10 years. My hair and I had creative differences a year ago and went all Simon and Hair Funkel and decided to pursue separate projects, so maybe I'm not the target demographic. But my lack of hair is not what makes this product ridiculous. It's what makes me ridiculous. What makes this product ridiculous is that it's a hairbrush with Bluetooth. If you're not asking why, you're not paying attention. For those of you unfamiliar with the technology, a traditional hairbrush operates using a fairly complicated system involving your hand, your arm, and a brush. There's no pairing, no password, definitely no firmware update. You pick it up and run it through your hair. At least that's how I remember it going. Apparently, that was no longer enough because someone developed a smart hairbrush with sensors that could connect to your phone and analyze the way you brush your hair. Finally. For generations families have suffered in silence, wondering, am I brushing correctly? And now you'll know. Some of these brushes can supposedly detect things like brushing force, speed, number of strokes, and the condition of your hair, which means somewhere in the world, somebody can finish brushing their hair, sit down with a cup of coffee, open an app, and review actual statistics showing a 17% improvement around the left temple. I don't need that much feedback from anything in my bathroom. My bathroom mirror already gives me more information than I am emotionally prepared to receive. And what happens when the Bluetooth doesn't connect? You're standing there at 6 30 in the morning trying to get ready for work and your phone says, hairbrush not found. Um, I found it. It's in my hand. Problem solved. But no. Now you're turning your Bluetooth off and back on. You're closing and reopening the app. Maybe you restart your phone. Reminds me of the weekend my e-bike needed an update, and I lost an hour of riding trying to figure it out. Now we're just talking about hairbrushing. But eventually you're standing half dressed in the bathroom Googling how do I factory reset my hairbrush? And somewhere, your grandfather is looking down from heaven thinking, we beat the Nazis for this. I also have questions about the data. Where does my brushing information go? Is it stored locally? Is it uploaded to the cloud? How much does big hair data know about me? I don't need an email three days later saying, Peter, we've noticed increased activity around the crown of your head. First of all, don't tease me. Second, mind your business. And you know eventually there's going to be a premium subscription with this thing. The brush is $79.99, but for just $6.99 a month, you now can unlock Hairbrush Plus. Free users get basic brushing. Premium users get advanced follicle analytics, personalized brushing recommendations, and access to historical stroke data. Historical stroke data. Do not send me your witty jokes. You know what my historical hair data looks like? There was hair, then there was less hair, then there wasn't. I've already analyzed the trend. Go ahead and take the rest of the day off. And because everything has to be connected now, you just know we're going to eventually have integration. Your hairbrush talks to your watch, your watch talks to your phone, and your phone talks to your bathroom mirror. And at 715 in the morning, Alexa announces, Peter, your grooming performance is down 12% this week. Alexa, zip it. I'm bald. Read the room. Here's the thing. God, the ridiculousness. Here's the thing technology is wonderful when it solves an actual problem. GPS? Fantastic. Pacemakers, incredible. Noise canceling headphones. Whoever invented those deserves federal funding. But a hairbrush? The regular hairbrush had already reached technological maturity. We were done. Bristles. Handle. That's it. We nailed it. Once we upgraded from porcupine quills, there was nowhere else to go. And yet somebody walked into a meeting, put a perfectly functional hairbrush on the table and said, You know what this needs? And nobody in the room had the courage to say nothing. So congratulations to the creators of the Bluetooth hairbrush and to everyone who decided that brushing your hair generated valuable data that needed to be captured, analyzed, and stored. You are the winners of this week's Drain Battery Society Solution Seeking a Problem Award. You took something so simple a caveman could probably figure it out and gave it connectivity issues. As for me, I'll stick with the grooming technology I've been using for years. A washcloth.

Recharge Recommendation

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You know what I'm talking about. The days that end in why. I realize you don't listen breathless with anticipation to see what I'm going to recommend for the week. That's okay. I don't do this podcast to recommend things. It's just a fun thing to add in that it doesn't necessarily have to do with the trials and tribulations of getting old, and it's nice to be able to relate things that you might get value from the way I do, or maybe in your own way. Plus, this is an exercise to try not to be grumpy all the time. So much like the neighborhood hardware store recommendation, this isn't a specific person, place, or thing. I got up early and while I was drinking coffee, I started going from streaming service to streaming service, and I happened onto the international feel-good phenomenon, Ted Lasso. I watched an episode of season four, which I never expected would come, and at the end, I found myself with leaky eyes. I'm not a sucker for a good Jason Sadeka show. Maybe a little. But I wondered why my tear ducks would choose to betray me at that particular moment. You ever notice that? You don't cry, not that I was crying, mind you, during the big dramatic speech. You're fine during that, it's expected, the speech, and we're desensitized to that intentional heartstring tugging, I think. But it's when somebody quietly does something decent for another person. That's when I start looking around the room to see who the hell is cutting the onions. And I realized the episode was about hope, family, dreams still unrealized, and a small dash of sentimentality without pandering to the audience. I wondered about the other shows that made me feel the way I was feeling shrinking with Harrison Ford, Jason Siegel, Ted McGinley, Jessica Williams, and Krista Miller, among others. Stick with Owen Wilson, Mark Marin, Mariana Travigno, and Peter Dager, all three on Apple TV Plus. It struck me that none of these shows are about the obvious soccer, therapy, and golf. They're about people trying to figure out the second half of life. Sound familiar? They're about carrying grief without letting it carry you. That too sounds familiar. They're about finding people who become your family, about realizing that hope is not something you're born with. Sometimes you have to practice those things. Each show gets there a different way. Ted Lasso gets there through optimism, shrinking through grief and healing, and stick through redemption and second chances. Different stories, same destination. All of them are real, the emotions I mean. It's easy to see yourself and at least one member of the large ensemble cast and then ponder your own choices, reactions to situations. In other words, these shows can teach us something. Sometimes it feels good to feel good. We've earned the right to let a television show improve our week more than buying something we probably don't need, haven't we? And that is this week's Drain Battery Society recharge recommendation. If you have something that recharges your battery, a book, a movie, a TV show, a place, a tradition, or just something that reminds you life is still pretty good, drop me a note at mailbag at drainbatteriesociety.com. I'd love to hear about it because chances are someone else listening could use the recommendation too, and we're all in this together, remember?

Listener Email

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The lesson I get from today's listener email is be careful what you wish for. I've been asking since this podcast began for email from closer to home, from Maine or New Hampshire. And this week I got my wish. Hi Peter. I'm writing from Fort Kent, Maine, so you can officially add at least one listener from about as far north as you can go without changing countries. I have something I've been thinking about lately, and I'm curious whether other people our age do this. Why do I save all my good stuff? Someone gave me a really nice candle for Christmas two years ago, and I haven't burned it because I've been saving it. Saving it for what? I have no idea. There must be a candle worthy event coming that I haven't been told about. I do it with clothes too. I'll buy a nice sweater and keep wearing the older ones because I don't want to ruin the new one. I have good bath towels that rarely get used, a bottle of maple syrup that was too expensive to waste on regular pancakes, whatever those are. And a set of wine glasses I appear to think should only be used if the governor stops by. Meanwhile, I'm fifty nine. How long exactly am I planning to save this stuff? Last weekend I finally burned the candle. Good for you. It smelled great. Nothing bad happened. Nobody from the candle company came and told me I had used it on an insufficiently important Saturday. I'm starting to think I've spent half my adult life protecting things I bought specifically to enjoy. Please tell me I'm not the only person who does this. Take care. Laura from Fort Kent, Maine. Well, thanks so much for your email, Laura. I wish I had a drain battery society scarf and a hat set for you, but even if I did, you apparently wouldn't wear it. I wait till summer. I have been to Fort Kent, actually, in the winter. Um I thought after a key west trip it would be fun to see the other end of Route One. It wasn't. Uh it was a nerve-wracking drive. That was what made it not fun. Getting there, uh not fun being there, fun. I loved Fort Kent, even though we stayed across the river in Canada because all the snowmobilers had taken both rooms Fort Kent had to offer. Got a great picture of the end of Route 1, though. Ten foot high snowbanks and two degree temps. That's living, baby. I'm noticing that um all our emailers, I hesitate to call them listeners until I can verify they've actually listened. All our emailers have that whole tell me I'm not the only one theme. What's that all about? Why are you so afraid to be alone, Laura? What about you, Steve? I'm kidding. You guys are great. I appreciate you emailing. So back to Laura for a second. I'm a little more practical and buy stuff I actually use. Like, why spend the money otherwise? I don't have young kids at home anymore, and therefore I can have nice things, and so can you. My grandparents had dishes nobody was allowed to eat from, towels that were for display purposes only, furniture nobody could sit on, and the stuff you could sit on was covered by a quarter inch of plastic. They even had a living room we as kids weren't allowed to enter until we became adults. So live a little, Laura. Use the good towels, wear the sweater. Be careful when you eat or drink with it on. That's simple. You probably do the same thing with the old stuff. Nobody wants to walk around all day with cabbage casserole smeared all over their chest. Except me, but I'm specifically weird that way. Listen, at our age, Tuesdays are a special occasion. We're here. Break out the good towels. Like we're old enough to know better, but we're not old old. Let's not waste this little window we have wondering why the hell we didn't enjoy ourselves more. It's like our retirement accounts. We saved all these years to do what? Keep saving it? Your kids have a lot more time than we do to build their own accounts. You need to enjoy life and your maple syrup while you

Closer

SPEAKER_01 30:23

can. That's the whole enchilada for this week. I sure hope you brought some sour cream. Hey, I'm still collecting submissions for the Things Nobody Admits show I'm hoping to produce. If you think it's all embarrassing stories, it doesn't have to be. Here's another way to think about it. What's one obsolete thing you secretly miss? There's your prompt. Not asking what old technology was better. That's boring. What do you miss? The Sears catalog, phone booths, road atlases? Handwritten letters, Saturday morning cartoons, maybe record stores. How about actual concert tickets? Paper menus, video stores, calling the time and temperature, maybe your answering machine. You decide. Email me all the things you won't admit to anyone else. No judgment. Yet. It's completely anonymous. I will not violate your trust, I promise. Hand in the air right now. Mailbag at drainbatterysociety.com. This week's commercials, clearly destined for greatness, are due largely to the vocal majesty of the fabulous Beth P shilling for Ethos canvas bags. And Nick wants a man who was born with the rare gift of making everyone miss the person who was speaking before him, repping for sovereign beard oil. He even sounds like a handsome bastard, doesn't he? Theme music this week was brought to you through another grant from the DadVice Consulting Group. I've always told my kids the same thing. Don't loan money you expect to get back, buy quality toilet paper, and never pass up the opportunity to dirty a clean public restroom. You're welcome. DadVice Consulting Group. Good judgment born from piss-poor decisions. I could always use your expert help growing the show. If you would, take a minute to share a link to the website with a friend and tell them that they have to hear this. Don't make it a choice. That way they think you're the idiot, not me, but only after they've fluffed my numbers up a little bit. I'm kidding about that. But I am anxious to grow the Drain Battery Society into the country's most okayest podcast for people over 50. Until then, get off my lawn. Keep your battery between 20 and 80 percent, and keep your expectations low. Thank you very much for listening to the Drain Battery Society. Barely charged, fully opinionated.