This American Life - 205: Plan B

Broadcast on: 01 Feb 2002

This is a short story by the fiction writer, Ron Carlson, in which a guy loses his job after 10 years of the job. His boss tells him, "Okay, go to Plan B." And the guy says, "This was Plan B," which is, I think, how it goes for most of us. We head off cheerfully toward Plan A, but Plan A turns out to be completely different from what we thought it was going to be, and so we switch to a backup, and then the backup plan becomes our life. A while back I was giving a talk to about 100 people and knowing I was going to be talking about this on the radio, I asked them to remember back to when they first hit adulthood. What is it that the thought their lives would be like? What was their Plan A back then? And I asked them, "Okay, how many of you are still on Plan A?" Out of 100 people, only one person raised their hand. Just one, the youngest person in the room, just 23 years old. Everybody else in the room was like, "Plan B. What about Plan C and D and F?" Today on our program, Stories of the Backup Plan, and people living the backup plan, which is most of us. From WBZChicago, it's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. I've programmed today on five acts, including the story of how you decide, as your backup plan, to kidnap the child of the most famous entertainer in the world. And Jonathan Goldstein's story, of how he took a telemarketing job just to tie things over for a while, and then kept it for 10 years, finding, to his disappointment, that he was better at telemarketing than at anything else in his life. Stay with us. Taquan, it's another tequila sunrise. John Hodgman tells this fable of giving up one dream for another, much more ridiculous dream. A few years ago, the company that owns Jose Cuervo Tequila purchased Marina Key, a small eight-acre speck of an island in the Caribbean, and they renamed it Cuervo Nation. They applied to the UN for independent statehood. They encouraged US citizens to defect via a simple ritual of drinking a shot. They even tried to field an Olympic volleyball team. The whole thing was a bold experiment in advertising via nation building. But since those heady early days of independence, the nation's patriotic fervor is calmed somewhat. He's now used as a place to send contest winners, and a promotional lure from members of the world press, which is how I found myself headed to Cuervo Nation last June for a series of very educational tequila tastings, and how I met the nation's most prominent citizen and ambassador to the world. He stood at the dock waiting for us as our fairy chugged over from Tortola. Shaven-headed, goateed, he sort of looked like Anton Lavey, were it not for the speed ofs, mirror shades, and red superhero cape. A satanist at spring break. Through a megaphone, he alerted us that we were now entering a party zone. As we disembarked, he began scooting maniacally around us with a tequila shot balanced on his bald head, daring us to suck it down without using our hands. This was Cuervo Man. The other Cuervo representatives were there to teach us about tequila. Cuervo Man, I was told, was there to party with us. His job was to party. And just as I began to grasp the frightening yet thrilling ramifications of this fact, Cuervo

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