QUESTION THIS

"YOU KNOW WHAT YOU SHOULD DO?"

Least favorite question of all time: 

“You know what you should do?”

It’s the question I am most often greeted with when my grown children and their growing children show up at my house. Sometimes there’s a list. With numbers.

They jump out of their various mini-vans and yelp, “You know what you should do first about that big mud hole in your driveway?”

Or . . .

“You know what you should do second after you fix that big mud hole in your driveway?”

Or it’s the same question with a technological twist . . . 

“You know what you should do? You should be on Instagram. Are you?”

And then I have to ask questions of my own. “What’s Instagram?” or “What mud hole?” or “Why do I feed you people constantly?”

My grown children are full of great advice on what I should do. I suppose it’s payback for all the years I stood at their grubby childish elbows telling them how they should live their lives. 

For example:

“You know what you should do?” I used to say. “You should shovel the garbage out of this bedroom of yours before I set it on fire or strip it down to a bare mattress on a bare floor and put you in solitary confinement. That’s what you should do.”

Recently, I’ve been working on marketing strategies to sell my latest book “Beyond the Strandline” which means that I’ve had to learn more about marketing than I care to know—now or ever. Slowly but surely, I’m learning the fine art of asking people for money. It’s not my favorite learning curve. 

And if I had my way, I’d stand on street corners with boxes of books, handing them out for free, strangely, my one and only investor objects to this business model. So, I struggle with the algorithm of “hand me some cash and I’ll tell you a story.”

“You know what you should do,” my daughter said. “You should be on Instagram. That’s the cool new way of ‘getting your stuff out there,’ Mom.”

I groaned, loudly. “I don’t want to.”

“Sure. It’s easy,” she grabbed my phone. “What’s your I-Tunes password?”

And so the agony began. An hour later, after re-setting seven to one-hundred passwords, losing all my credit cards (inside my own house) and wrestling with a dozen or more blank screens, I am on Instagram.

I still don’t know what it is.

You know what I should do?

Hire an admin. 

Unfortunately, administrative assistants want to be paid—with money.

Linda (Books 4-Sale) Zern