Quantum Leap; Why Does LinkedIn Matter?; and Correia Family Stories with Jared’s Mom!

Episode Notes

Transcript

Jared Correia: I’d like to take a moment to thank my mom for listening to every episode.  Now, my mom is the real reason you’re listening to this show right now, but the sponsors have a little something to do with it as well.  So, I’d like to thank our sponsors too.  Cleo, Alert Communications, Scorpion, TimeSolv.

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[Music]

Intro: This is the Legal Toolkit with Jared Correia.  With guest Terri Teague a special edition of Correia family stories and then, we gather around the fire and sing carols as Jared puts up his Christmas tree way too damn early.  But first, your host, Jared Correia.

Jared Correia: Yes, it’s time to open up the Legal Toolkit.  Welcome to the show.  It’s so-called Legal Toolkit for some reason.  Even though I don’t really know how to work a lace.  I’m your host, Jared Correia.  Jack Parr was unavailable.  So, I guess, that makes me sub-par?  I’m the CEO of Red Cave Law Firm Consulting.  A business manager in consulting service for attorneys and bar associations.  Find us online at redcavelegal.com.  I’m the COO of Gideon Software, Inc.  We build chatbots to law firms and convert more leads and conversational document assembly tools so law firms can build documents faster and more accurately.  You can find out more about Gideon at gideonlegal.com.

Now, before we get to our interview today with Terri Teague of SmallBiz.Consulting and the Digital Power Team, we’re going to go deep on LinkedIn.  I want to talk about time travel.  Theorizing that one can time travel within his own lifetime.  Dr. Sam Beckett stepped into the quantum accelerator and vanished.  He awoke to find himself trapped in the past facing mirror images that were not his own and driven by an unknown force to change history for the better.  His only guide on this journey is Al, an observer from his own time who appears in the form of a hologram that only Sam can see and hear.  And so, Dr. Beckett finds himself leaping from life to life striving to put right what once went wrong and hoping each time, that his next leap will be the leap home.

Damn, I’ve always wanted to do that, that felt great.  You know, that still gives me goosebumps for more than 30 years later.  You may have heard that Dean Stockwell died this past week?  He was a child actor starring in the mid-1940s when he was under contract for MGM and his acting career lasted over 70 years.  If you’re old, or a film buff, you may be seeing him in The Boy with Green Hair or a Long Day’s Journey into Night.  He was in Married to the Mob, Paris, Texas and Beverly Hills Cop II.  I don’t know that I’ve seen any of those movies, honestly, and I got that list from Wikipedia.

But what I do know is that Dean Stockwell was in Quantum Leap and he was freaking fantastic in it.  That part rather the top of the monologue.  That was called a dramatic reading was the intro from Quantum Leap, and Dean Stockwell played the aforementioned Al.  Admiral Al Calavicci to be exact.  Quantum Leap was a television show that aired on NBC from 1989 to 1993.  I remember when network television was still a thing and of course, I watched it because I clearly watched too much TV as a child.  But I fucking love Quantum Leap.  It was the first adult TV show I ever watched consistently.  I’m using air quotes and I saw every episode and it’s still my favorite TV show to this day.

Now, even if I was basically in my TV from Willy Wonka, only with better hair, I’d like to think 11-year-old me was a young intellectual.  I read a lot of books and felt like I was pretty thoughtful.  It’s like Quantum Leap was right in my wheelhouse.  So, let me talk to you about the premise.  Dr. Sam Beckett, yes, they named the main character after the second-best Irish author ever.  So, I’m already in.  He invented the time machine.  Only, he gets a little aggressive and decides to test his unfinished product by himself to avoid losing funding for it.  He wants to prove it works predictably.  Of course, this is like the original story for like every sci-fi program ever made, right?  That backfires, and Sam is stuck traveling out of time.  But with a twist, he’s not himself.  He leaps into other people’s bodies, get it?  He uses a quantum accelerator and he leaps into other people’s bodies, so, Quantum Leap.

(00:05:01)

Now, Sam moves through different time periods by possessing other people’s bodies as I said, at a time, specifically when they made a bad choice that essentially destroyed their lives.  His job is to make the right choice or to do the right thing and to save these people.  So, Al, that’s Dean Stockwell, remember?  He’s a real person, but Sam sees him as a hologram and he helps him in his various quests.  Al has this like Zack Morris phone style device that uses the monitor Sam’s chances for success using percentages based on the actions that Sam takes throughout the show.

Yes, that’s right, they were using wind probability in the1980s TV show, which is pretty cool.  So, with Al’s help, Sam changes an individual’s life.  And when he does that, when he succeeds, he gets to leap into the next person.  The hope is that at some point I guess to go back to his own body and that seems legit, frankly.  This idea, they might eventually fix his own mistake because he clearly fucked up that choice to test the quantum accelerator on his own in the desert with no one around while it was essentially in beta.  Bad choices are bounding here.

And so, at the end of every episode, you get a preview of Sam’s next project.  Who’s he leaping into next, right?  And again, hopefully, it’s him at some point.  Now, this is a phenomenal premise for a television show.  I’m a sucker for anthology series anyway, but the notion that the next episode could take place at any time over a 40-year period in recent history.  Remember, he can only leap in his own lifetime.  With an entirely new supporting cast, that definitely keeps things fresh.  There was always some simmering level of excitement from episode to episode about where Sam would go next, you know, when you can just binge everything in a single weekend and actually have to wait a week to see what happened next on the TV show.  The old days.

But this can see — gave the producer a chance to throw Sam into a number of different impossible scenarios.  He leaps into a professional baseball player in the middle of a game.  He leaps into a fighter pilot in midair.  That’s the pilot, pun intended.  Leaping into a bounty hunter handcuffed to his bounty.  This is all good stuff, right?  It’s a tried-and-true method to start every episode off of the bank.  And, you know, she is about to go down when Sam completes his mission and all of a sudden, he’s immediately surrounded by blue light and those familiar sound effects come on that signify he is transferring to the next body.

As I mentioned, Dean Stockwell as Sam’s holographic helper, but Scott Bakula is in the show too, he’s a star.  He plays Sam.  It’s just a tour de force, man.  I never understood why that dude didn’t have a better career.  I even watched all his crappy movies like Necessary Roughness.  Plus, the Quantum Leap theme song was written by Mike Post who’s the god of 1980s TV theme songs.  And they had some famous guest stars too, Brooke Shields, Jennifer Aniston, before she was on Friends.  Roddy McDowall, Jason Priestley, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Neil Patrick Harris among others.  This is a cool show.

Plus, Quantum Leap was before his time in tackling complex social issues too.  There was an episode where Sam, who was white, leaped into a black teenager during the Watts riots, and then he leaped into a KKK member who had to save a civil rights activist.  He leaped into a woman that have been raped.  He leaped into a man who had Down’s syndrome.  He leaped into a body of his brother’s best friend during the Vietnam war and then had to decide whether to save his brother or complete a mission.  He leaps into the body of an asylum patient and immediately receives electroshock therapy, not great.  It was just crazy shit like that every week.

This show is like endlessly entertaining.  I want to go watch it right now.  It was an appointment viewing and that’s my take on Quantum Leap.  Next, the next leap will be the leap into our guest interview.  Sorry, I realized that was underwhelming and anticlimactic at best.  Now, before we talk with our next guest, Terri Teague of SmalBiz.Consulting and Digital Power Team about LinkedIn, let’s see what Joshua Lenon has mixed up in the quantum accelerator for the Clio Legal Trends Report minute this week.

Joshua Lenon: According to research from the World Justice Project, 77% of legal problems do not receive any legal support.  It’s a dummy(ph) figure since it tells us that the legal industry has a problem connecting the people who have legal issues to the lawyers who can help.  I’m Joshua Lenon, Lawyer in Residence at Clio.  There’s an opportunity for lawyers to help bridge the gap with clients earning more business while doing good things to help the people that need it.  New research shoes that being flexible about how you get paid can ultimately mean getting paid more in the long run.  In doing so, you could be opening up your services to more clients and avoid missing out on earnings.  To learn more about these opportunities and much more for free, download Clio’s Legal Trends Report at clio.com/trends.  That’s Clio spelled C-L-I-O.

(00:09:59)

Jared Correia: So, let’s get to the fried green tomatoes to this podcast.  Actually, I hate tomatoes, but I like ketchup.  Discuss.  It’s time to interview our guest.  My guest today is Terri Teague, the founder and principal of SmallBiz.Consulting and the Digital Power Team.  That sounds super impressive.  Terri, how are you?

Terri Teague: I’m good, thanks Jared.

Jared Correia: Good.  Thanks for coming on the show.  As I promised, I was going to have you on the podcast and here we are.

Terri Teague: You did, you did.

Jared Correia: I want to talk to you today about LinkedIn for lawyers specifically based on our audience.  I’ve noticed over the course of the last like, I want to say call it a year and a half, two years that the use of LinkedIn has exploded for business professionals.  And it was big before, including for attorneys.  So, I know that you’re on there quite a bit, you have some programs that you’re working with that we’re going to talk about but like, what is your sense of like where LinkedIn is now, how important it is for business development and kind of why this change occurred?

Terri Teague: It was pretty easy, actually.

Jared Correia: Well, we need at least like 15 minutes of content.  So, try to embellish a little bit.

Terri Teague: Okay.  I can do that.  So, at the beginning, okay, there was purportedly 604 million users on LinkedIn.  But only about 3% of those people playing on it — participating on it.

Jared Correia: Really?  Wow.

Terri Teague: Yeah.  Because of COVID, we all got stuck at home, there was really no place to play.  LinkedIn became a new playground.  A new business playground.  Prior to COVID, it was really more of a place for finding a job or finding employees, really.  It was kind of like a public resume holder.  It has shifted that — the gear shifted.  So, it is really now a place to do business in a way that it wasn’t pre-COVID.  There are about 740 million users now from as I say, 603 or 604 million prior.  So, basically it has grown overnight.  Everybody flocked there because there was — we couldn’t get a normal chamber breakfast.  We couldn’t go to Kiwanis Club and business people had to keep moving, you know.  It’s stir the pot or die.  So, you know, so LinkedIn really just became the platform that we could do business on in a way that I think they may be envisioned, I don’t know, but certainly, it has flourished for sure.

Jared Correia: I’m sure they had that planning meeting when they were like, “All right, when the global pandemic strikes, we’re really going to start kicking ass.”

Terri Teague: Right.

Jared Correia: But I think it’s interesting for a couple of reasons.  Like one thing you said, you said, 3% of people were engaging pre-pandemic.  That’s crazy low.  Wow.  Is it higher now?  Do they have stats now or —

Terri Teague: Yeah.  I haven’t heard recently from LinkedIn, you know, folks speculate it’s more like 8% or 9% now.

Jared Correia: I mean, that’s a significant number given the number of people they have on there.

Terri Teague: You know, there’s a lot of voyeurs.  Here’s the lovely thing about that though.  Let me just tell you, it’s actually not a bad thing, it’s a good thing.  If you compare it to Facebook, they’ve got something like, I don’t know, 40% participation, 50% participation.  Have you’ve ever tried to post anything over there?  What we’ve seen over there is nigh onto impossible.  In this particular format, you can actually play and be seen and at least for a while yet, I think, it’s a more — it’s the Wild Wild West, really, a little bit right now.  So, yeah, I encourage people to get on it.

Jared Correia: Oh absolutely.  To get on it and actually participate and post things not just work.

Terri Teague: Yeah.  So, just to watch and look is really not playing the game.  You really have to really truly create content.  That is the big game.  Creating content is the game.

Jared Correia: And just to be clear, this is different than like what some people do on social media, which is like, “Here’s a quick sentence about what I did and the link to a video,” right?  Yes, we have to like write more of a narrative, that plays better on LinkedIn, right?

Terri Teague: Plays way better.  You know, the algorithm on LinkedIn, we noticed has changed.  When we first started playing literally one year ago as a group, we saw that, you know, videos played quite well and would get us the attention that we were looking for.  We would — we noticed also things like personal stories with a nice picture.  You know, it would also get us some views and get some play, if you will.  That’s actually shifted.  In the past couple three months, they really — they’ve moved away from quantity of engagement to what I’m calling quality of engagement and they’re measuring that by what is called dwell time or how long somebody is staying on your content.  So, yeah.

Jared Correia: Interesting.

Terri Teague: Yeah.  So, it’s not so much how many people come to your post as much as how long the one stay that do come to your content.

Jared Correia: I love stats.  So, like let me just ask you this quickly, like the stature referencing, right?  These are publicly available statistics?

Terri Teague: They are publicly available.

Jared Correia: Yeah.  And let me ask you this, like you can get the stats for LinkedIn in general, like how do you access stats in the best possible way for your specific LinkedIn account?

Terri Teague: Yeah.

(00:15:00)

Jared Correia: Like what’s the — where do you get those analytics?  Where should you I should say?

Terri Teague: Well, I use a third-party software shield AI and they — it’s an awesome — it really keeps me up to date.  I mean, I can see body hour, how many people look at my post.  So, I really love that — the particular app.

Jared Correia: That’s really cool, yeah.

Terri Teague: That’s my go to, yeah.

Jared Correia: And they’re capturing other stats, I’m assuming.  Like if this 12-time metric is becoming more important for LinkedIn, it’s capturing that stat as well?

Terri Teague: Absolutely, yeah.  You can see a lot.

Jared Correia: So, with this notion of dwell time, right?  It would seem to make sense that you write more so people have to read more and stay longer.

Terri Teague: Look at you catching on so quick.

Jared Correia: I’m just trying to hang with you, that’s all.

Terri Teague: Yeah.  So, the new techniques for getting people to stay a bit longer are right what we call — we’re calling in our group, the long form.  That’s how we reference it.  It’s much like a small article.  No pictures, no emojis, straight verbiage, and if you can upload it as a document as opposed to writing it in the posting square there on LinkedIn, you actually will get more views.  We don’t know why, but we know —

Jared Correia: Really?  That’s crazy.

Terri Teague: — uploading like loading a document, actually gets you more views.  The other things on —

Jared Correia: I never would have thought of that, honestly.

Terri Teague: Well, we only figured it out because we have so many people playing and communicating with one another about what works.  That’s how we know what we know.  We read what other people say, you know, Hootsuite for instance, will they publish data on their — you know, what they see, they see many people.  So, we learn from them.  But we also — we learn from each other.  We’ve got about 100 players that communicate together and share information.  So, that’s how we know.  The other couple things that are pretty helpful or pretty useful when it comes to getting views are uploading a lead in our PowerPoint.  Every click on a PowerPoint equals —

Jared Correia: Oh my god, PowerPoint?  Really?

Terri Teague: Yeah.

Jared Correia: So funny.

Terri Teague: Or you kind of click through document.  They’re really liking documents right now or uploading a video.

Jared Correia: Really loving PowerPoint.  This is great for lawyers.  It’s like the 90s are back.

Terri Teague: Yeah, you can — it’s really simple.  I just upload document then you’ve got these — you got options there.  So, uploading things, you know, it seems to be what they’re interested in right now.  And I think it kind of goes along with their new theory, that valuable content is where it’s at when.  So, when you’re doing an added value post for your industry, the LinkedIn algorithm is going to support you 9 time out of 10.

Jared Correia: I never would have thought to upload a PowerPoint to LinkedIn.  Furthest thing from my mind to be perfectly honest with you.  So, that’s really impressive.

Terri Teague: Yeah, we’re still experimenting though.  No lie.  We’re figuring all this out as we go and this is — actually, just in the last month, we’ve been kind of trying some of these things out.

Jared Correia: The other thing I was interested in that you talked about, so, you talked about Hootsuite a little bit, which for folks who don’t know is like a social media management platform where you can manage multiple social media accounts in one space.  It sounds like you’ve got your LinkedIn app shield just giving analytics from LinkedIn.  But then it sounds like you’re also utilizing Hootsuite and let its capability as well.

Terri Teague: Some people do in our group.  Adding Hootsuite because people use Buffer, they use (00:18:13) Social, they use — there are several.  You could search some if you want.

Jared Correia: Yeah, awesome alert tools.

Terri Teague: Awesome alert tools, yes.  It just depends on what you like.

Jared Correia: So, for lawyers who aren’t producing PowerPoints on a regular basis, I’m producing documents on a regular basis, it seems like the best play is to write more narrative, longer form content, right?  Well, there are other things that people could do who aren’t like regular content producers.

Terri Teague: Yeah.  An easy one, create a poll.

Jared Correia: Polls.

Terri Teague: Create a poll about anything, seriously.

Jared Correia: I haven’t seen a lot more polls, I will say that.

Terri Teague: It’s because they work.  We’ve got several lawyers in our group and it’s amazing.  We’ve got whatever our guys — Josh, is going through the roof.  He, I think got 17,000 views on his last poll.  I mean, it’s ridiculous.

Jared Correia: Oh my gosh.  On just a poll.

Terri Teague: Just a poll.  But now he writes also wonderful long form as well as do all of our attorneys.  I think we’ve got five or six on the team and they’re of course competitive.

Jared Correia: Naturally, they’re lawyers, right?

Terri Teague: Naturally.  Right.  But we have good fun and so yeah, if you still have any time, but you want to put something out there, once in a while, do a poll.

Jared Correia: I think what’s really interesting is like, this fits well in particular for attorneys who write all the time who are generally good writers and this is a great space for them to be in.

Terri Teague: It is.

Jared Correia: My guess, and a lot of attorneys, like you mentioned before who were like hit hard by the pandemic because all they did was referral marketing, this is the place where you can do that now, but you just got have content affiliated with it.

Terri Teague: So, I would say, yes or no.  It’s not as easy as falling off a log, frankly.  And the first job is to be seen.  I mean, that is the first job.  In writing good content, that’s the key to being seen.

(00:20:01)

One of the keys to being seen.  But that’s probably not going to take the day.  What takes today as a combo of writing great content and then expanding your connections, because LinkedIn watches everything you do.  So, if you’re playing hard and that means you’re creating content, but you’re also really reaching out to people and also accepting the people who reach to you and growing that connection basis.  Kind of number two in the steps for —- you know, really using LinkedIn and getting something out of it.  You know, my recommendation is to be certain that when you do post that great content and it sparks interest that people check out your profile because that’s exactly what happens.  You know, as soon as I do that, invite them to connect with you.  Just quick and easy way to build that connection base.

Jared Correia: And this is an interesting question too, because we’re talking about playing the game in the right way.  So, when you’re talking about adding connections, do you feel like there needs to be some kind of communication that takes place before that?  Do you ever do cold outreach and then, what is your advice in terms of like reaching out to someone?  Like you don’t just hit the connect button, right?  You want to put a message in there, some kind of law, right?

Terri Teague: Not anymore.  People are much more discerning about who they connect with nowadays, because I understand that that’s your community.  So, you’re really growing in a community.  Plenty of people asked to connect to me that I declined, because they don’t fit my target audience.  I’m building a community that is my target audience.  And you know, I’m a B2B girl.  So, if your B2C, we’re not in the same world and well, right?  So, you know, I think discrimination is really the way to go.  You want to grow the numbers, but you want it to be a real audience, not just a quantity audience, you know, the warm body audience, you know?

Jared Correia: Yeah.  And then, in terms of like writing connection requests, like what do you advice people to do on that?  Like how long should that be?  How much detail should you get into because nobody is necessarily going to — one word?

Terri Teague: Yeah, I have one word for you.

Jared Correia: What’s the word?  Yes?

Terri Teague: Authentic.  You know, I get so many requests that I can tell they’re using a bot design to look authentic, but it ain’t authentic.

Jared Correia: Oh right.  Yes.

Terri Teague: It’s not real.  You can always tell even at the best bots, you can pretty much can tell.

Jared Correia: So, no bots as well, right?  We’re also saying no bots here?

Terri Teague: I will say no bots.

Jared Correia: Yeah.  I would agree.  Bots certainly.

Terri Teague: If they catch it, they will put you on timeout.  They don’t like those.  But they also — they’re spammy.  Like who wants that, right?  I’ve got several requests these past week.  I mean, several.  It’s just — so, maybe it’s a new tactic, I don’t know, but I’ve got people reach out to me and said, “Look, will you just connect with me?”  We’re still worst to that effect.  “Like I’d really like to connect.”  “I want to be in your audience, will you connect it to me?”

Jared Correia: That’s funny.

Terri Teague: And I find that so refreshing that I’ve said yes to every one of them.

Jared Correia: Yeah, that’s pretty cool, yeah.  And the worst bots are like the follow-up bots where like you get the one responses.

Terri Teague: I hate that.

Jared Correia: A million others says (00:22:58) of my existence.

Terri Teague: Yeah.

Jared Correia: So, this is great.  We’ll take one final sponsor break so you can hear more about what our sponsors can do for your law practice then stay tuned for the Rump Roast.  It’s even more supple than the roast beast.

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Welcome to the rear end of the Legal Toolkit. the Rump Roast.  It’s a grab bag of short-form topics, all of my choosing.  Why do I get to pick?  Because I’m the host.  I got to tell you, we have a very special guest today.  Maybe the most special guest we’ve ever had on the podcast.  I talk about it at the top of every show.  It’s my actual mother, Joanne Correia.  How are you doing, mother?  Welcome to the show.

Joanne Correia: I’m doing well, thank you very much for asking.

Jared Correia: I know you got the story from me, but we did like family stories show where I was relaying family stories to a guest and she didn’t believe them.  And they were mostly all true, mostly.  So, we were talking the other day, and I just want to confirm that my grandfather did have a zoo, basically?

(00:25:00)

An in-home zoo?

Joanne Correia: Yes.  He certainly did.  Yup.

Jared Correia: Okay.  But the dispute between you and I was whether or not there was a woodland cat included in the zoo.  I thought I remember him having a lynx or a bobcat or something crazy like that, but you don’t.

Joanne Correia: Well, I do not.  I remember he had a bobolink, he had —

Jared Correia: Oh maybe — oh, no, bobolink is a bird, right?

Joanne Correia: Yup.  The bird in the back, we had bees, we had — you had ducks.  Did you tell the duck story?

Jared Correia: I haven’t.  But let’s not get out of ourselves.

Joanne Correia: Okay, okay.

Jared Correia: I’ll give you an opportunity to tell that story.  But you said you had a story that you brought with you.  So, I will only allow one.

Joanne Correia: I do.

Jared Correia: All right.  What do you got?

Joanne Correia: I have a great story.

Jared Correia: Okay.

Joanne Correia: Okay.  So, you know that when — after your father had passed away, you and your brother and your sister were no longer living with me.  So, I said, “I think I’ll sell the house and come and live with grandma.”  Grandma was late 70s.  So, one day, I drove home.  I drive into the driveway, and there is your grandmother removing the air conditioner from the window.  Resting it on the chair that was on the porch and she’s ready to climb in the window.

Jared Correia: Wait, she’s breaking into her own house?

Joanne Correia: Yes.

Jared Correia: It’s kind of impressive for a 70-something year old.

Joanne Correia: I know.  Oh, she was late 70s.  Maybe early 80s because you weren’t even living with us anymore.  I said, “Mom, what are you doing, mom?  What’s going on?”  Oh, she was so mad she said, “I am so mad, I’m ready to spit nickels,” because grandma only had (00:26:34).

Jared Correia: She is very good.

Joanne Correia: Oh yes, that’s it.  So, “What are you doing?  How come?”  She’s, “Oh, I lost my keys in the car.”  “So what?  I’ve got a million times.  You could have fallen there who would have picked you up?”  “No, the car was running.  I’ve done that too, so, who cares?  You still got to call me.  But I left my pocketbook in the car.”  Okay, I locked the —

Jared Correia: There’s a whole sequence going on here.

Joanne Correia: “You could have still called me.  No problem.”  I said, “Okay.  So, mom, where are we going to go?”  “Well, my heel hurts so I called the doctor, I wanted to go and see him, he gave me an appointment.”  “You had a doctor’s appointment?”  “No, my heel was bothering me so I called the doctor he said I could go in.”  “Okay.”  So, I backed out of the driveway, we’re going to go up to where her doctor’s office is.  Maybe half a mile from the house.  Oh, we go to the doctor’s office — no, no, he’s not there.  When he was not there.  We’ll he’s moved group.  “Okay, so, we’re going to go to the group so, where’s the group?”  Okay, so, the group she tells me, instead of being like half a mile from home, the group is approximately four miles from home.

Jared Correia: Okay, not terrible.

Joanne Correia: Four miles.

Jared Correia: But you’re driving.

Joanne Correia: Yeah, I was driving, she had walked home from the doctor.

Jared Correia: Oh, she walked home from the doctor’s four miles?

Joanne Correia: Yup.

Jared Correia: Oh my god.  No wonder her heel was hurting.

Joanne Correia: And the four miles were like country roads.

Jared Correia: Yeah.

Joanne Correia: Or maybe two miles and then, she had the mall to go through which is like mall parking.

Jared Correia: Yes.  Yeah.  Like dangerous areas for an elderly person to be walking.

Joanne Correia: Yes.  And then, she gets to like New Bedford’s version of room one and she gets — so she walks all the way home, she removes the air conditioner to climb into the window to —

Jared Correia: After walking on the highway, yes, basically.  Basically, that’s a highway.

Joanne Correia: As we’re driving up to see the — get the car, I turned to her and said, “How was your heel feeling now?”

Jared Correia: Not great.

Joanne Correia: Heel?  “What’s wrong with my heel?”

Jared Correia: Got a lot of it.  It’s fun to get old. Okay.  So, that was a good story.  But you were talking about the pet ducks that I used to have.  And that’s real.  I had two pet ducks.

Joanne Correia: Yeah, Brutus and Nero.

Jared Correia: They’re not named after the Roman emperors, but named after the alligators from The Rescuers movie.

Joanne Correia: Exactly.  And you were trying to teach them to swim.  So, when you brought them in the house, their heads were hanging.  They were almost dead.  (00:29:39).

Jared Correia: I was not aware that ducks could not breathe underwater.

Joanne Correia: Exactly.

Jared Correia: Science class failed me.  Actually, I was probably five.  I had never gone to school.

Joanne Correia: Which I had to teach them to swim underwater.

Jared Correia: Yeah, yeah.  They were terrible.

Joanne Correia: Yeah, (00:29:53), wow.

Jared Correia: Yes, I came in with the ducks by the necks, right?  And their heads were fluffed over.

(00:30:00)

Joanne Correia: They asked like what mother leaves their child in a pool with two ducks.

Jared Correia: No, what child doesn’t have two pet ducks?  But I also had a pet goat as well.

Joanne Correia: Oh yes, you did.  You had a pet goat.

Jared Correia: Less creatively named, Billy.

Joanne Correia: Yes.

Jared Correia: The goat.

Joanne Correia: Yes.

Jared Correia: And we had — I don’t think — I want people to understand that like we lived in the city.

Joanne Correia: Exactly.

Jared Correia: In this tenement when I was growing up.

Joanne Correia: Yes.

Jared Correia: Like three apartments that’s on top of each other, and there was a live goat along with two ducks that lived in the yard and a dog.

Joanne Correia: And a dog.  And the dog loved it because the dog would chase them around like racing (00:29:53).  No wonder (00:30:41) — he was probably traumatized.

Jared Correia: So, I think — I feel like living close — I think the moral of the story is like the fewer animals, the better.  And I want people to know that I have no pets today.  I wonder why.  We have a lot of good car stories as well.

Joanne Correia: Oh, we certainly do.

Jared Correia: I remember like that our family went through more cars than any other family I can remember.  Like we change cars more frequently than most people change their underwear.  I remember like every day I woke up, we had a new car.  I remember dad bought a Volkswagen one time and I was all keyed up because we had a yellow Volkswagen like, Bumblebee in Transformers.  And then, a day later, the cops were repossessing it because he bought a stolen car and we had to get a new car.  We had so many cars.  Didn’t your dad pick you up in a car one day without any floorboards?  I remember that.

Joanne Correia: That’s wasn’t one day, that’s years.

Jared Correia: Or is like that every day?

Joanne Correia: Oh, that was — yes, he had a station wagon with no floorboard.

Jared Correia: No floor at all, right?  Like a Flintstones car.

Joanne Correia: Right.  And so, you’d put your feet on the muffler.

Jared Correia: To warm them in the winter?

Joanne Correia: No, to keep your feet on the — to keep your feet up so you put your feet up on the muffler, it’s hilarious.  Nobody wanted to get in the car with it because all — but when it was raining, all of the water would come up the road.

Jared Correia: But that’s like — but I mean, if your like — but some kids are like, “Oh, you know, don’t pick me up in like the Volvo because I’m embarrassed.”  You actually had a car that had no floorboards that and a muffler falling off.  You should have just ridden a horse.  I want people to know who are listening that like, I’m not making any of this stuff up.  I feel like City Hillbillies is kind of an appropriate description, right?  Don’t you think?

Joanne Correia: It was funny.  Well, my grandma had lived on that.  It wasn’t fun.

Jared Correia: Yeah.

Joanne Correia: Originally, where we live now wasn’t fun.  You just never really get over the fact that it wasn’t funny.  I always thought he could have the animals.  One of the helpers in our house (00:32:35) that chickens would escape from the backyard and your uncles would be sweeping them off the street with a broom.

Jared Correia: Yeah, it was an interesting place to live in.

Joanne Correia: Oh yeah, it was fine.

Jared Correia: Yes.  So, I feel like —

Joanne Correia: (00:32:49) how about tell the story that we had a very, very nice family that lived behind us living in the ground or remember, on one side of the fence, it were the bobolinks, the geese, we have —

Jared Correia: At your parent’s house?

Joanne Correia: On Elle Street, yeah.  When I was — yes, and so, every other day, a blooming(ph) rooster would fly over the fence and drown in the pool.  We had more calls from the health department.

Jared Correia: Dead rooster in the pool.

Joanne Correia: And you can imagine, they could have moved in.

Jared Correia: Why would you want to live next to those people, right?  Like one morning you walk out there’s like a Bengal tiger in your pool.  I feel like it was like the tiger king, the roosting king, the bobolink king.

Joanne Correia: Oh yeah.

Jared Correia: I feel like there’s a Motion Picture deal in here somewhere.  So, if there are any like Hollywood type producers who are looking to do like the next big reality show, like I’m ready to go.

Joanne Correia: There you go.

Jared Correia: Full expose. I think we are long past time.  But thank you for coming on.  This is fun.  Did you have fun?

Joanne Correia: I did.  I had a very good time, thank you very much.

Jared Correia: Now, I want to take a moment to thank my guest today.  Terri Teague from SmallBiz.Consulting and the Digital Power Team.  To find out more about Terri, visit digitalpowerteam.com.  And our very, very special guest, my mom, Joanne Correia.  She’s a retired teacher and doesn’t have a website.  So, just leave her alone and enjoy the moment.  Now, for those of you listening in Experiment, Georgia, we’ve got an awesome playlist this week on Spotify.  Songs about science.  That’s right.  Science.  Well, we’ve run out of time for (00:34:32).  But you should know that I do a killer version of barbecue from Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas.  That will do it for another episode of Legal Toolkit podcast where I come from.  Thanks, come back next time.

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