The Baby Elephant Expertease

Warning, this is not the Expertise podcast. This is an illegally recorded phone conversation about the Expertise podcast. By listening, you are a party to that illegality. And that's the best kind of party there is. Hello, offices of Expertise. This is Clare Sera. How can I help you? Hi, this is Danno Sullivan calling in. Is that Clare? Danno, this is Clare. Are you taking calls today? Yeah, oh, you know, from the hours of 3 to 5. I thought we had agreed. Oh, I forgot my shift, didn't I? Oh, Danno! I'm supposed to be answering phones right now. This is Danno. Thanks for calling. How may I help you today?

Hey, Danno. It's Clare Sera. I was just calling to see if you were on duty. Yeah, I'm doing my shift. You know me. I love to do things by the book and earn my paycheck, Clare. You know, Danno, I don't mean to nitpick, but you seem to have been a little bit forgetful lately. And, you know, this is a business and we need to run it with business-like acumen. Absolutely agree, and I guess I just have to apologize. What's going on? Have you been out to the basement of our offices lately? Gosh, I have not been to the basement. Clare, could you just drive on over?

Sure, I can. Oh my gosh, Pavement Avenue was so packed today. Yeah, we really should consider moving our office to someplace a little more secluded, especially when you see what I have in the basement. Okay, all right. Look over here in this pile of newspaper and straw, Clare. It's the cutest little... Danno, what are you doing with a baby elephant in our basement? As you know, Ringling Brothers has canceled the circus as of a couple of years ago. Yeah. An elephant's gestation period, Clare, is two and a half years. Some of those out-of-work elephants from the circus were pregnant at the time, and it's only now that these baby elephants are being born.

Danno, how long have you been keeping this elephant in the basement? About 15 minutes. It is a brand-new elephant baby. Oh my gosh, it's so big. It's hard for me to believe. I'm scaring it a little bit. So here's the thing, Clare. You know, our lease is almost up on this building. Right. And if we renew, we get the same annual rate, and we cannot afford any higher rent on this place. Right, for sure. If Mr. Bo Jansen finds out that we've got an elephant in the basement, there is no way he's letting us stay. But Danno, if we tell Mr. Bo Jansen that there's an elephant in the basement, he's going to have to lower our rent.

That's like an invasion, like vermin. It would be much more effective if there was more than one baby elephant in the basement. Then it would seem like an ant invasion, or termites. Right, and then ironically, they might tent the building, and we would look like a circus. And when people came, we would have something to show them. So, in fact, we want what we said we don't want to happen, to happen. Oh my gosh, isn't that like life? All right, Clare. You go out and get a couple more baby elephants. I'm going to call Mr. Bo Jansen, and we'll meet back in 15 minutes.

Okay. Clare, I can't believe you were so successful. Were these elephants just being born? These poor abandoned mothers from the circus, these mother elephants, are just there. Clare, come on now. There is no need for that kind of coarse language. Mother elephants. Danno, I'm not sure what to tell you, though, because the mothers are following behind. We've got a full-on elephant invasion. A full-on elephant invasion is just what we need, Clare. A full-on elephant invasion is just what we need, Clare. We need to get these elephants on all floors, scurrying around.

See if we can throw some peanuts into the walls to get some of them to get into the crevices. Okay, Danno, we've got elephants in the basement. We've got elephants in the walls. We've got elephants in our Gerald. Thank you for calling Offices of Expertise. Mr. Bo Jansen, can I put you on speakerphone here with Clare? Hello, Mr. Bo Jansen. Ask him if his wife is there, Johanne Bo Jansen. Oh, Johanne Bo Jansen? She'll be very sympathetic to our cause. Mr. Bo Jansen, if you don't give us what we want, we are moving out of this, and you'll never get your rent for this stupid old podcasting studio office space again.

And nobody else is going to rent this place. It's infected with elephants. I hope that doesn't give it away. Because what we need, Mr. Bo Jansen and Johanne Bo Jansen, we need some of those big exterminating tents over the entire building. But they have to be multicolored. They have to be decorated with silver and gold stars all the way around. And they have to be erected by a team of shirtless men with five-day-old... Danno, Danno, hold on now. Yeah? Excuse me, Mr. Bo Jansen. We need to do an inner office call. Danno, I realized something. That this whole thing was just a way for you to get a shirtless man demand from Mr. Bo Jansen.

And this is the third time this month. Claire, if we are going to make any money off our shirtless men of expertise podcast calendar, we've got to have the shirtless men. So yes, it was a little bit of a ruse, I admit. But you haven't been bringing in the shirtless men. That was your commitment. Come on, I've done all this work. I found a baby elephant and planted it in the basement just to get you to say, let's pose as a circus. Why don't you just stand outside and bring in some shirtless men? We've got the photographer set up on floor three. We've got the InDesign print layouts all ready to go for the calendar.

It's almost the end of the year, Claire. And how are we going to... If we don't have shirtless men, how do we have a shirtless men calendar? Danno, you're absolutely right. And look, I apologize. I have not held my part of the bargain up with the shirtless men. And I understand, too, that that's part of why you've been so distracted and you've not been doing your shift of answering calls because we have not been able to get this calendar out. I just want to point out to you that sometimes there's a more simple way of moving forward. Danno, why don't you take your shirt off and pose for our calendar this year?

And there we go. We have it. That's one month, Claire. That's the only thing. I know it makes me sound so negative. But unless there's a way for me to, I don't know, rotate my body to different angles 12 times. Wait, what? Could it be that simple, Claire? Danno, I think you just nailed the shirtless man on the head. All right, Claire. I'm stripping down. You get the camera. You know, sometimes, Danno, I think at Expertise we can get a little stuck in our heads. Why did we make a promise to our listeners that we would give them a shirtless man calendar every month?

Yeah, you're right. It's not really on brand. I mean, we're about expertise, knowledge. You know, I guess I just wanted to combat the stereotype that intellectual people are not brawny, attractive, and handsome with their shirts off. How's your dating life going right now? I don't know anything about dates, Claire, because I don't have a calendar. I remember a while ago we were talking about your profile, your dating profile. I know. You see, I evade these hard questions with humor. It's, you know, it's a weakness from childhood. It's what I used to do, you know, to get away from a bully.

I'd make a joke. And take your shirt off? That was it, yeah. Yeah. And now you've combined those things into a wonderful career. And nobody is shaming you for that. I just feel like perhaps we've conflated things and have made things more difficult for ourselves instead of a little bit more straightforward. So just take your shirt off. I'll fire up the camera. Say something smart. That's the thing, Claire. I feel that, you know, to get on brand, our listeners do enjoy those pithy witticisms that we're known for. And that because it is a purely audio format, when I say something clever or smart, I think that conjures up in the minds of our listeners that brawny, good-looking he-man that I want to be.

So what if we just eliminated the pictures and the calendar altogether? And just every time I said something smarty-pants, you kind of went, oh! Like it was, you know, really titillating. Maybe we could get like one of those, you know, those morning drive radio DJs? You know, they have buttons for that. Maybe we could just get a button that made that noise. Oh, a button to push, not a button to wear. No, no, no. Yeah, because I have a button that I wear on my lapel that says, I'm brawny underneath. Don't you find me titillating? Yeah, I have a bigger lapel on the other side where it says, don't you find me titillating.

Danno, I borrowed your sweater one chilly afternoon and wore it down to Claire's Cafe Hut, and it got me into a lot of trouble. Well, because of your natural folds, I think the button didn't read in its completeness. I had a lot of people making very physical overtures. Yeah, yeah. I apologize for that. That is a man's button. Yeah, and I pushed it. So does that solve things? I speak and you titter? Yes. Well, the button titters. Let's get a button for that. Oh, right, right. I've got the button here. Let's give it a try. So what would be something perfect for me to say to sort of arouse that emotional response in the listeners?

Maybe if you quote like Percy Bysshe Shelley or, you know, Yeats. How about this, Claire? The sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side. I think it's going to work. It's going to be great. Claire, thank you so much for talking me through this. I hate bringing my personal baggage to the office, but it's great to have real friends who understand what I'm going through. Could you do my shift tomorrow to answer the phones? Oh, sure. Why? I've got some personal baggage to unpack. Okay. You got it, Danno.

Oh, my gosh. We left Mr. Johansson on speakerphone.