This evening on the way home I decided to call into my home phone voicemail and see what interesting stuff the tele-marketers and bill collectors left me this week.

"You have ten messages. First message." Joy.

"My name is Ian Urbina from the New York Times..." Now here was something interesting. He left his cell phone number so I scribbled it on the back of a gas receipt while tearing down McCormick Road with a cell phone headset in one ear and some Euro-dance in the car speakers from the iPod.

"Is this Ian?" I asked.

He confirmed that it was.

"This is Rob Carlson returning your call."

"Could can you remind me what this is about?"

"Well, I think you were calling me about barcodes."

He seemed very excited and told me that he had been having a hell of a time getting in touch with me. He was feeding his kid, so he asked if he could call me back. I told him that was fine, but I couldn't guarantee I would answer. He seemed a little put off by that, so I explained that he would have to call me back from his cell phone onto my cell phone so it would actually ring when his number showed up on the display. If he wasn't in my address book, it would just silently go to voicemail.

We joked about how it was like setting up a rendezvous to exchange top secret information just to connect by telephone. I asked him what the subject of his book was, and he replied that it was about how people deal with life's little annoyances, particularly in my case the ones brought on by technology.

I laughed and asked him, "And you're surprised that it's so difficult to get in touch with me by e-mail and cell phone?"

He admitted that he should have expected it but he didn't think that one single person would have issues with so many electronic devices at once. In fact, he is writing a book as a follow up to his article "No Need to Stew: A Few Tips To Cope With Life's Annoyances" on March 15, 2005.

He agreed to call me back at 20:00, and I agreed to try really hard to answer.

I didn't make it back home until around 19:30 from driving around town with Frank trying to buy a new mower. The guy we were going to meet wasn't there, so he finally wound up lending me his self-propelled gas mower, which worked like a dream. I just put on my headphones and followed it around the yard until it was done mulching and turned it off. Probably the friendliest appliance I'd worked with all day. In 20 minutes I had successfully beat the thunderstorm to my lawn.

Around 20:10 I got back into the house to find my phone beeping with a voicemail after a call from my mother and two from Ian. Oops. The answering machine upstairs on the phone that never rings was speaking with my voice to a caller that was probably him.

I grabbed a beer from the fridge and called Ian back from the swing seat in the backyard. His first question was about when I had set up the site and I told him I honestly didn't remember. I told him that the last time I had given it any real thought was sometime last year and that most of the specific details were undoubtedly somewhere on the website or in someone else's article, and didn't he have any questions that weren't somewhere on there?

He explained that he couldn't really quote anything from the website because that's not how it works (anymore, I thought), but agreed to ask more interesting questions.

"Okay," he said, "how old are you and where do you live."

I was in a good mood this evening and staring at a freshly cut lawn, which is why I laughed instead of sighed. But things picked up from there.

We got into some interesting thoughts about swap meets and the fears of having your own purchase information used against you with some of my favorite anecdotal stories. I never did get to the Super Fresh card story, but I'll probably e-mail a link to that later this evening when I follow up with him.

He was reluctant to let me go as he wasn't sure if he would get in touch with me again. Don't worry, I told him, my e-mail is just like the cell phone. Once I send you something, your replies will actually pass throug the filter in the pile of a hundred or so daily e-mails that I actually read out of the 4,000 that arrive every day.

I'm not sure he was convinced. Oh well, we all have our own way of dealing with life's reporters.

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