A client needed to send me some production materials–a script and some audio recordings–in order for me to begin work on a short project tomorrow. Normally they’d just upload the files to my FTP sever, but in this case everything was a hard-copy: the script printed on paper (with hand-written notes) and the audio burned to CD-R. These hard copies were also in midtown Manhattan and I’m in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.  Someone had to go pick them up.

Just to be clear (least my colleague read this and get the wrong idea) this wasn’t a big deal and I’m not really complaining. I only mention it as another one of ways I see my digital and analog lives blurring.  I’ve grown so used to making these kinds of exchanges online that taking a few extra minutes to make a physical hand-off somehow seemed…maybe not antiquated so much as unnecessarily inefficient given the tools at our disposal.

Again: NOT a big deal. The subway makes New York City a reasonably good sneakernet. Besides, I enjoy reading on the subway. I had just finished a book, so I grabbed one of my roommate’s magazines on the way out the door. (I tend to read magazines online these days.)

Settling into my Q train seat a few minutes later, I opened to the first page and caught myself thinking, who turned off Adblock?

Occasionally radio producers in other parts of the country hire me to do “tape synch” recordings. For any non-radio folks reading this, a tape synch is a way producers can interview people remotely without having to rely on the scratchy sound of “phone tape” (recording the actual phone line).  Instead, they’ll hire a guy like me to go to the interviewee’s home or office.  They’ll conduct the interview over the phone while I sit unnaturally close to the interviewee getting a high-quality recording of our end of the conversation.  Afterward, I’ll upload the audio file so the producer can synchronize recordings of both sides of the conversion on a computer, as if the conversation had taken place in person. It’s the next best thing to recording an interviewee in a good studio and transmitting the audio feed via an ISDN connection.  So the next time you’re listening to All Things Considered (or whatever) and you hear, “Mr. X comes to us from his home in Brooklyn Heights,” that’s how it happened.

(In case it’s not obvious, these aren’t “live” conversations.  In fact, the majority of public radio is very highly edited. Most people don’t realize Car Talk isn’t live. True live shows usually rely on some combination of phone tape or a remote studio via ISDN connection.)

I’ve recorded dozens of interviews with authors, politicians, actors, musicians, and heads of corporations. Every now and then (twice so far this week) I’ll be listening to the radio and hear some of the same people on-air again. I don’t really know these people, of course, and most of them certainly wouldn’t remember me.  But I’ll hear their voices and remember the hour or so I spent with them, the small talk before and after the recording.

His grandfather clock was ticking loudly throughout the recording.

I biked to her apartment. It was raining and she offered me tea.

I was allergic to his cat and holding back a sneeze the whole interview.