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EPISODE 0108 - DEC 15, 2020 HEY

A Dumpster Fire of a Year

with Andy Didorosi, Adam Stoddard, and Nathan Anderson
Listen now

HEY launch, App Store, we can’t take it anymore 🎵 Antitrust, masks a must, let’s go eat the upper crust 🎵 Comfy pants, TikTok dance, POTUS rants, protest chants 🎵 COVID cruise can’t disembark, David’s back in Denmark 🎵 We didn’t start the fire—well, in this case we did.

Transcript

Wailin: (00:00:00) It’s been a wretched year. I don’t need to recap it, we all lived through it. And a couple of months ago, Basecamp’s Head of Marketing, Andy Didorosi had a work call that kind of 2020 vibes.

Andy: (00:00:13) Jason, our CEO, and I had our year check in. I had been at Basecamp for a year. And to be totally honest, it wasn’t a fun one. It was a conversation where we both said, the results we’re getting from our spending and our effort is just not good. All the other things we do, storytelling and Signal v. Noise, the blog, building a good product, are dramatically outperforming our marketing efforts. The traffic isn’t good, the signups aren’t good. We had a mutual conversation where it was like, should we even market anymore? And on the table was me just not working at Basecamp. And that, like I agreed. I was like, I don’t want to keep pouring money into ads and sponsorships and stuff that just aren’t working.

(00:01:01) I think we probably talked on the phone for three total hours, maybe even four across a couple phone calls. The ideas we came into was like, well, why don’t we just flip the script entirely. For this amount of money, the mid six figures a year, why don’t we just build things that are fun. And after the first one, if it just doesn’t stick? Then we’ll just part ways.

Adam: (00:01:24) We were doing more advertisings and podcast ads, and it’s like, okay, this is fine. No one was really excited about it, there just wasn’t a lot of energy and enthusiasm.

Wailin: (00:01:36) Adam Stoddard is Basecamp’s marketing designer.

Adam: (00:01:39) So we were really trying to figure out a way to approach it in a very different way that you wouldn’t see from a lot of other companies.

Andy: (00:01:48) Everybody is trying to get through the same door. Everybody is trying to buy ads on the same marketplaces. As more and more companies try to do a predictable thing to grow their company, it gets more and more expensive. The only thing that’s going to work here is something that doesn’t make sense to most other people.

(00:02:06) Broken By Design by Clip Art plays.

Wailin: (00:02:07) Welcome to REWORK, a podcast by Basecamp about the better way to work and run your business. I’m Wailin Wong.

Shaun: (00:02:12) And I’m Shaun Hildner. Today on the show, we talk about what Andy and a small secret team here at Basecamp came up with to get some exposure for Hey, that new email service we launched earlier this year, and maybe have a little fun at the same time. Do you remember fun?

Wailin: (00:02:28) I most certainly do not. But thankfully, we work with people who managed to hang on to a sense of joy and whimsy this year. One of those people is Andy. And after this stressful phone call with Jason where they conceded that the marketing of HEY was not going well, he came up with something called H.E.R.L.

Andy: (00:02:49) H.E.R.L. is the HEY Email Research Labs.

Adam: (00:02:54) The thing that Andy invented as a device for these silly email-centric experiments that we’re doing. And it’s a very fun thing that I really liked when he pitched it because it makes these things bigger than they otherwise would be. Wraps this world around them and a veneer around them that gives them purpose and not just a series of one off things.

(00:03:18) The conceit is that H.E.R.L. is a division of HEY, but they’re like the terrible research team that’s stuck down in the basement somewhere that everyone forgot about and they don’t even realize they’re on the payroll anymore. So they just do their silly experiments that absolutely do not pan out into anything that translates to something that would involve monetary gain. Which is also the pretext for the way the website is, where it’s this old operating system because that’s their bespoke mainframe from when they first became a thing. And it’s just been that ever since because they can’t get funding to do anything else.

Wailin: (00:03:56) Now the story that Adam and Andy created around H.E.R.L. might be fictional, but the experiments very much take place in the real world.

Andy: (00:04:03) When I originally pitched this, I pitched six ideas, sending a small satellite into space, with a little screen that you could email. We talked about doing big light installations. We talked about a bunch of different ideas, but what we came to was, this has been a hard year. People have lost family members, people have lost jobs. And you know, it’s not turning around soon. We built this as a virtual catharsis machine. This is for something that people can write a message to us, a gripe, something they’ve lost, and we will burn it on a live stream.

(00:04:36) So you email dumpsterfire@hey.com with whatever you want. Text, or you attach an image, and it will print it out on the live stream, bring it up a conveyor belt, and then it’ll dump it into this flaming dumpster that ignites upon printing. Once the print gets there, it bursts into flames, burns your email on camera and then goes out.

Adam: (00:04:57) In retrospect, it probably would have been a little easier to do one of the other experiments that… Well, two things. One, this had to be outdoors, which has its massive amount of complications because of that. But also, it’s slightly more contentious, maybe, than some of the other experiments just due to the nature of the thing. I mean, it’s burning paper. It’s not not wasteful.

Andy: (00:05:23) It’s a big flaming dumpster. So it had to be outside. I tried figuring out a bunch of ways to bring it indoors, because we’re in Detroit, and it is winter time. And so I wanted it to be outside, but it had to be protected from the elements. So you have one thing that’s trying to make a bunch of heat, and then you have something else that needs to be protected, all the electronics and the printer.

(00:05:44) The solution that I came to was a shipping container, like a normal shipping container that you’ve seen. Stuff gets shipped in on boats, or now they’re making coffee shops and restaurants out of. This whole thing is sitting outside in the side lot of my company, the Detroit Bus Company. I still own this small bus company in Detroit. We’ve had to park our operations because of COVID. So we aren’t using the facility for anything right now.

Wailin: (00:06:10) we’re going to come back to how Andy sourced all the parts of this contraption. But first, let’s go deep into the guts of this thing.

Andy: (00:06:17) I knew this was going to be a pokey, difficult project. There isn’t a Stack Overflow page you can pull up that’s going to solve this for you. We actually had to create and invent some stuff here. It is an iceberg of complexity.

Nathan: (00:06:29) At the beginning of the last cycle. So about six weeks ago, I get a ping from him out of nowhere. It’s like, hey, do you want to be involved in a project? It’s secret squirrel. And I’m like, of course. I mean, I don’t even know anything about it. But of course.

Wailin: (00:06:44) Nathan is a Systems Administrator on Basecamp’s Technical Operations team.

Andy: (00:06:48) When I thought about the right person for this project, I needed someone who had a broad array of skills, a good problem solver. But also enough of a weirdo to go at this thing. And Nathan has such a broad array of interests, and is also kind of a meme lord. So all of these things combined, equaled the perfect H.E.R.L. programmer.

Nathan: (00:07:16) He kind of started walking through the idea. And I’m like, I can’t describe how happy I was that we were doing something like this. It was just such a fun project. Basically, they said, we need a way to be able to receive email, and then do something with it, and then burn it. And we need you to figure out the do something part.

(00:07:43) Our first run was, well, let’s just create a HEY account. And we’ll just send the email into HEY. And then we realized that that means that we would be storing and keeping every single email from every person that emailed us in. The other side of that would be, we would need some way to programmatically do something with those emails and send them somewhere, which would mean a lot of developer time to integrate it into the HEY code base, and try to special case out a job or something.

(00:08:15) So we needed a different solution and luckily, we use this very popular piece of software called Postfix, which is just an email receiving program. And we’re able to just kind of intercept the email before it reached HEY and shoot it over to Amazon’s Simple Email Service. And then once it was in Amazon Simple Email Service, we could do a whole bunch of other things around spam detection, file size, sender limits, or sender rules. We could block people. And then I run some code to do some size checks, I render the email out, we extract out the text or the image that they sent in, and basically get that ready so that we can print it.

(00:09:02) The other component is a Raspberry Pi that is actually on site at the dumpster. It’s actually on the ground underneath the printer,. A Raspberry Pi is what they call a single board computer. It’s a very small, very cheap computer. And it is the interface between the software world and the real world. We tell the Raspberry Pi, go pull a message off of the queue up in the cloud. We’re able to do some in-person moderation on it, right? Because we don’t want to just feed the internet straight into this printer. So every job that goes through gets seen by a person, they are clicking approve, or skip, or skip and block this jerk, or skip and block all emails from this domain.

(00:09:44) Once that gets approved, it goes into yet another queue. And there’s another loop on the Raspberry Pi that runs continually. It says oh, there’s another job I need to print, so I’m going to print it out on the physical printer and I’m going to trigger these relays with some low level hardware stuff on the Raspberry Pi. And that will start the belt and stop the belt. And it’ll also start the fire and stop the fire. That’s pretty much what happens.

Wailin: (00:10:14) You can see this on the live stream at HEY.science. Adam, Basecamp’s marketing designer, was in charge of making a website for this fictional agency H.E.R.L. that would be the digital home for the dumpster fire and any future projects.

Adam: (00:10:27) It’s like an amalgam of various old operating systems. So classic Mac operating systems is a heavy influence. A bunch of other older operating systems. It’s still pixelated, but there’s color worked in. What you’re looking at is hOS, it’s HEY OS, it’s our own OS. And so that let me, as I was making the site, make my own rules about how this operating system works.

(00:10:50) We need unpaid interns at the HEY Email Research Laboratory because they don’t have funding. So all the visitors the website are interns that are helping us conduct these absurd experiments.

(00:11:01) So you end up on the landing page, you’re in the portal for the mainframe, which has a couple directories, one of which is the the dumpster fire. And then there’s another one because there’s a glitch in the mainframe where it’s a password protected folder, but it’s there for some reason. But yeah, when you try to click on it, you get a an error message. That’ll be a fun little easter egg thingy as we proceed down the road. And then of course a about.txt file to give you a little information about what it is that you’re looking at.

Wailin: (00:11:38) And of course, no agency branding would be complete without a logo, which you can see as the wallpaper on the site.

Adam: (00:11:45) It is an envelope shooting on a rainbow rocket thrust into the stratosphere to your inbox and beyond, basically. But the fun part of this was maintaining that pixel aesthetic through all of these assets. So for both of the seal itself, and then the little graphic I made for the dumpster fire experiment itself.

Wailin: (00:12:08) Okay, let’s go back to the actual dumpster fire. Andy is based in Detroit and describes himself as a wily junk collector in a rust belt city. So finding all the pieces of this machine was right up his alley.

(00:12:20) Step one, get a Dumpster.

Andy: (00:12:22) Detroit hadn’t had recycling for decades. And so some Burning Man sort of culture jammer folks started their own out of an old Lincoln factory. A couple years ago, the city started offering recycling but this organization is still running. So I texted the owner of it and said, hey, I think out of anyone you would probably have a spare dumpster, right?

Wailin: (00:12:42) And oh, boy, howdy did this renegade recycling guy have a spare dumpster.

Andy: (00:12:46) It’s still very much a compost dumpster inside. I’ve crawled inside of it a few times and I regret it every time. The dumpster has had a life before us in the art world. So the previous owners had cut a TV hole in the front, because it used to be like a can game at a recycling center. You’d throw a can at these targets. And if you hit one, it would like celebrate it on the TV.

(00:13:08) These kind of moments are going to present themselves to you. This dumpster in this project would not have had a TV in it if we didn’t find a dumpster that already had a TV hole. But now that it has a TV hole, we have the opportunity to put videos on there. Right now it says 2020 on it. But I stream YouTube clips on there. We do Windows screensavers. It’s a fun way to add another layer to the project that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

Wailin: (00:13:35) In addition to being a wily junk collector, Andy has also developed a side hustle of buying and reselling industrial equipment.

Andy: (00:13:42) The conveyor belt I already had. I bought at auction maybe 10 years ago, just to resell it. It was a pill bottle sorter. It would sort the caps for the pill bottles. And I had had it listed for sale for eight of those ten years and it never sold. And when I was looking for pieces to do this, it was kind of a Mythbusters moment like, yeah, let’s just use that. Tilt it up, you know, is it perfect? No way. In retrospect, I think a treadmill would have worked better. But this looked cooler. It’s all aluminum. It’s got a big red stop button on the side.

Wailin: (00:14:14) Once Andy had all the parts, it was time to call on some experts to put everything together.

Andy: (00:14:19) But we decided that it needed to be this intentional object. If you’re going to have people participate in it, you have to bring at least as much intention as you hope they do when they send you a thing. So we hired local artists, a local designer, local fabricators to help build this thing.

(00:14:36) The fabricators that worked on this, there was three of them. The leader of the fabricator pack is named Ben Wolf from Ferrous Wolf. They normally make shipping container stuff and big art objects. There was Monica Dubray, who’s a local designer who did all the colors. Eric Froh is an industrial designer who actually figured out the chimney, greenhouse design. How can we make this look evenly weighted? Josh Bacon is the flame designer. So he actually is one of the heads of safety for fire safety at Burning Man. It was really important to me that the flames would come on because of the action that you did. They would do the thing, and then they would go out. I don’t want it burning all day. And so he actually built all of the flame effects for the project.

Wailin: (00:15:22) The H.E.R.L. dumpster fire went live on November 24. And it blew up.

Shaun: (00:15:26) Wait, what?

Wailin: (00:15:27) Well, no, not literally, thank God, but it… let’s see, it blew up in the way that things on the internet can go viral.

Shaun: (00:15:34) I don’t think you can say viral anymore.

Wailin: (00:15:36) No, everything’s ruined. Let’s say the dumpster fire got a lot of attention from the start. And it was all a bit much for the video streaming account that the team had set up through IBM. Here’s Nathan.

Nathan: (00:15:49) I checked on it when we when we hit 5000 fewer hours. And our plan that we were on gave us 100. So we’d already blown past that limit. And I’m like, okay, we can still fix this. Let’s bump up to the platinum account, which is a big chunk of change per month, but you get a lot more viewer hours. You get 5000 and the overages are less than half the price on the silver plan. And then we ended up hitting like 30,000 viewer hours and realized that, doing the math, that’s $5,000 in one day. It’s a very expensive dumpster fire.

(00:16:32) So Andy got really quickly behind the let’s move this to Twitch. So we switched the main video feed over to Twitch. But we’re still using IBM video to send out people’s clips.

Andy: (00:16:47) The traffic, the submissions, the public reception has all been incredible. I mean, 10 out of 10. Right now we’ve got a backlog of almost two months of submissions. Just over 20,000 submissions, which I would have never expected could be the outcome from this.

Wailin: (00:17:03) With any project that involves a complicated machine, especially one that sits outside and is affected by temperature and wind, there’s going to be some troubleshooting, Add in the popularity of an interactive public art project, and there’s a lot to keep the whole team on their toes.

Andy: (00:17:19) When we hit the front page of Hacker News, I knew we were gonna have people trying to break it. And it was, I think it was minutes into us trending on Hacker News, somebody had figured out how to make a mail loop and Nathan had it fixed like an hour later.

Nathan: (00:17:31) We had one guy said his reply to email address as dumpsterfire@hey.com. I found out about it when we noticed we had 35,000 emails in our VIP queue. Luckily, I did write tools so that we could strip all those out and those worked like a charm.

(00:17:49) One thing that we’ve been trying to do is speed it up. When we first built it, every print job from when we pull it out of Amazon’s Cloud, and we start printing it and we send it up the ramp and it gets burned. That all would take 75 seconds for each one. It worked. And it was nice and coordinated. But let me check right now. We have 18,391 emails in the queue right now that are waiting to be printed. And that number has only been growing. So we needed to speed this up. So I think I’ve knocked that down from about 75 seconds, down to about 45 or 50 seconds.

Wailin: (00:18:31) And all of this work wasn’t just a sell more HEY accounts. Again, here’s Adam Basecamp’s marketing designer.

Adam: (00:18:37) Part of what we wanted to get out of these is that we don’t really know what the results are going to be and how people engage with it. And even down to the environmental consequences and the machine not working right. Like those are all like interesting, fun, outcomes, where it’s like this somewhat controlled chaos. To me, that’s what makes it interesting, where it’s not just this kind of static dead thing. But it’s this living organism with everyone participating. And it just makes for really interesting outcomes.

(00:19:14) The goal here was not specifically about like, ooh, we only count this as a success if we get X number of signups for HEY. That’s not that’s not what this is about, at all.

Andy: (00:19:26) They see this and they go, what the hell? You guys built all this so I can email a dumpster fire? What is this? And to us, we’re going well, this is way cheaper than paying some media company to say our name 50,000 times.

Adam: (00:19:43) It’s very refreshing to be able to do things that just wouldn’t fly on a website where there’s a funnel involved. So not really caring about any of the conversion stuff and just having it be totally about the experience is very, very refreshing. It’s like you’re being in a suit all day and you go home and put on your comfy sweats and just like, aaah.

(00:20:10) I am free to do literally anything, particularly with this project. That’s where silly, fun things like custom scroll bars and custom mouse cursors and things that I absolutely would never ever, ever do with a more production-y website.

Andy: (00:20:30) I’ve said this several times, it’s more fun than I should legally be allowed to have at work.

Wailin: (00:20:35) Nathan is in Kentucky and Adam is in California. So, this was a project that came together across time zones and geographies. The dumpster fire itself requires a lot of onsite human supervision in Detroit, Andy has been doing almost all of the content moderation, approving each email that gets printed. Employees of the Detroit Bus Company, the business he started before joining Basecamp and still owns, are also monitoring the operations.

Andy: (00:21:00) There is always a human standing by ready to hit the big red button to turn off the fire. Because it is run by 500 gallons of propane in a giant thing called a pig. The paper though gets stuck, and so people need tongs to drop the paper in if it gets jammed up. Wind happens. I originally planned for this project to be 24/7. What I wasn’t thinking of is that the software can crash, the conveyor can get jammed up. Things happen that need technical intervention. You can’t just sit in front of it.

(00:21:33) So then it was nine to nine. But that means I was getting here at like eight, leaving at midnight, that was not so good. What I ended on was nine to five. I was like Basecamp’s entire thing is that we get it done in 40 hours a week. If we don’t get it done in 40 hours a week, we need to change what we’re trying to accomplish. So it runs 40 hours a week, nine to five Central. We just run recordings of it throughout the night on the stream.

(00:21:54) The kind of impact that I was getting from running it 12 hours a day is almost identical to the amount of impact I’m getting running it eight hours a day. We just got over 3200 emails processed through the dumpster, I think I’ve approved probably 99% of those. I would say it’s less than like a quarter of a percent, maybe even less than that of messages that I throw in the garbage can. People have been almost universally cool at what they’ve submitted. And a lot of heartfelt stuff. We’ve had a lot of people write things about family members they’ve lost. There was a marriage proposal. There is a family that suffered a miscarriage. I mean, people are using this for real catharsis. They’re trusting that we’re going to handle that information well. So that stewardship is important. I don’t take that lightly.

(00:22:48) We were really intentional and to not be nihilistic with this, it isn’t supposed to be a dark thing that nothing matters. It’s supposed to be something where you would have hung out around a bonfire with your friends, if you could, let’s have that social experience online. I ran the thing 12 hours on Thanksgiving, because I figured it was going to be a hard holiday for people. My parents actually brought me a plate here. And that was one of our biggest stream days. Lots and lots and lots of people chatted with me, four, five, six hours on the thing. I think there’s a lot of loneliness out there. Using our marketing bucks to build a cool tool to try to abate some of that. That’s a cool mission. I like it.

Wailin: (00:23:25) Andy estimates that the dumpster fire cost around $35,000 to build.

Andy: (00:23:31) Which is like half of moderate engagement with a media company for an ad campaign. So that that’s like the things that we’re not going to get back. The fabrication expense and the dumpster and the printer and toner and propane and stuff. There’s probably about $20,000 of assets that we could use again. Cameras, computers that will live on to the next project.

Wailin: (00:23:53) As for the dumpster fire itself.

Andy: (00:23:56) I would say there’s probably two potential futures. One is that it goes to a gallery somewhere. We’ve had some interest from some art galleries about putting this there and making it an enduring project. That’d be a wonderful thing to have happen and I would not have expected that to be even a potential future.

(00:24:12) Or the second is that we make a website for it that people can see what it was and all of these pieces go off to do something. Either go into the community, I can see… the shipping container is useful for so many things. I imagine these built objects will go on to lead more lives, doing more weird stuff. Once you put that energy into the world, it generally keeps going.

Nathan: (00:24:36) Yeah, Andy has already hit me up and I’ve already been sworn to secrecy on a bunch of other ideas that they have. Secret squirrel club, activate.

(00:24:45) Broken By Design by Clip Art plays.

Wailin: (00:24:53) REWORK is produced by Shaun Hildner and me, Wailin Wong. Music for the show is by Clip Art.

Shaun: (00:24:57) If you would like to email the H.E.R.L. dumpster Fire send your message to dumpsterfire@hey.com. Again, that’s dumpsterfire@hey.com. There’s a pretty big backlog of emails waiting to be burned. But if you have a HEY.com email address, little pro tip here, you can jump to the front of the line. The H.E.R.L. website is at HEY.science. And you can watch the live stream at dumpsterfire.email.

Wailin: (00:25:23) There were some other details of how the project came together that we weren’t able to include in today’s episode. And Andy wrote up a behind the scenes post for our company blog, Signal v. Noise. We’ll link to that in the show notes for this episode, which you can find at rework.fm.

(00:25:49) And now for another installment of our podcast within a podcast, Shaun Wick where Shaun reviews a candle and we talk about all things cozy,

Shaun: (00:25:58) Little peek behind the curtain here. We’ve actually recorded this once before, but there was an issue with the recording. Would you like to recap your story of the illegal moonshine that you made in your fridge?

Wailin: (00:26:13) I would love to. So I had gotten this apple cider that came from a local farm. I got it at the local butchers. And I had it once after I took it home and then I kind of forgot about it. And then yesterday I thought it would be a nice afternoon cozy pick me up to have a mug of warm apple cider. So I took it out of the fridge. And I noticed that the plastic jug was a bit misshapen at the bottom. When I opened it, it went fffff… You know, like a lot of air was coming out. And I thought oh no, this is fermenting now, so I gave it a sniff and I couldn’t really tell like it seemed a little bit more vinegar, but not like it had completely turned. I dumped it into a pot and I heated it up. And the thing just kind of took on a life of its own. It—had a lot of…

Shaun: (00:27:10) Started talking to you.

Wailin: (00:27:11) It had a lot of foam on the top that I wasn’t expecting. I thought is this thing just gonna grow legs and walk out of here. But I persisted. I persisted.

Shaun: (00:27:21) You powered through to drink this gross, gross thing!

Wailin: (00:27:28) When I thought I had reached a good temp, I turned it off. But I am a bad pourer. I cannot pour anything. And so then my husband had to come back downstairs. At this point, it’s like not even worth it. He’s just trying to get work done. And I had to have him come back downstairs to help me pour because he’s much better at it. And it had to be done over the sieve and all this stuff. But he poured a little bit too boldly. And it made a huge mess. And now it’s like on the counter and it’s on the floor. And our kid is trying to do remote school. She’s like what is going on over there? We’re like, be quiet. Do you want cider or not?

(00:28:07) I put a little agave in there because I was worried it was going to be too tart. It was fine. I guess I would describe it as fine.

Shaun: (00:28:15) That’s so gross. You throw it out.

Wailin: (00:28:17) I didn’t want to waste it.

Shaun: (00:28:20) Well, would you like a little pro tip for the next time you make apple cider?

Wailin: (00:28:24) Oh, I would indeed.

Shaun: (00:28:25) I like to heat mine up in a slow cooker, but you can do this in a pot like you do. Cut an orange in half and take a bunch of cloves and stick them spiky end first into the outside of the orange, into the peel.

Wailin: (00:28:38) Yeah, yep, I can picture it.

Shaun: (00:28:39) And then they stick in really nice and ends up looking a little like a half Coronavirus.

Wailin: (00:28:43) Lovely.

Shaun: (00:28:43) Which is great. But it makes it so you’re not fishing out and you don’t have to strain out all of these tiny little clove pieces. And adds a little a little citrus and clove along with your cinnamon.

Wailin: (00:28:54) Hum.

Shaun: (00:28:55) And then also add quite a bit of bourbon.

Wailin: (00:29:00) Okay, are you gonna review a candle?

Shaun: (00:29:01) Oh, yeah, let’s do this super hip candle called Polyamberous.

Wailin: (00:29:08) What a pun. What a pun.

Shaun: (00:29:11) I know, right. By a company called Boy Smells, which is gross and I don’t like saying it.

Wailin: (00:29:17) Did you feel weird buying a candle from a company called Boy Smells.

Shaun: (00:29:21) I did and I also, it’s this hip online company. So I get marketing emails daily.

Wailin: (00:29:28) Just unsubscribe.

Shaun: (00:29:29) I have Kacey Musgraves. Every time I try to watch a YouTube video Kacey Musgraves is shouting me to buy different scents.

Wailin: (00:29:36) What a life.

Shaun: (00:29:37) I know.

Wailin: (00:29:39) What does this one smell like? It comes in a fabulously shiny gold jar. Can I have that afterwards to use as a pen holder?

Shaun: (00:29:47) Yeah. Do you want me to empty it out?

Wailin: (00:29:48) I do because I hate cleaning out candle jars.

Shaun: (00:29:52) Yeah, no problem.

Wailin: (00:29:53) Thank you.

Shaun: (00:29:54) The next time I see you in person, Wailin. So this will be your 2021 present.

Wailin: (00:29:57) I can’t wait. I can’t wait. We’ll put so many pens in there.

Shaun: (00:30:01) All right. This one smells like one of those sticky summer evenings. You know, the party is winding down and only the core group is left to polish off that blender full of watermelon margaritas. And y’all can just sit comfortably in silence enjoying the hot sweet air that seems to hold everyone close like a warm hug.

Wailin: (00:30:23) Oh. No, thank you. No. I don’t like being hot.

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