The Analytics Lady

It occurs to me to take you “Entre Bastidores”(behind the scenes) at joecsmolen.com’s Editorial Offices and invade some of our resident employees’ cubicles.

Take the Analytics lady. She puts in a lot of hours, and some of the time she even thinks. She reminds me I’ve been on-line three years and she thinks it’s valid to tell me I’m doing OK. She points out, though, that every time I “blast” out a monthly newsletter, I lose subscribers. That’s the bad news. The good news is that she calculates our subscriber retention rate at 85-86%. To my own optimistic mind, that is to say, most subscribers are finding something redeeming about the whole experience of joecsmolen.com

Xenia, the Analytics Lady has a surgical edge to her devil’s advocacy, though. She had her mouth full of an entire red vine when she said, “What about the ones that unsubscribe? Maybe they just can’t take the radiation. Maybe your subscribers who are so durable have just adapted like the birds at Chernobyl.” She chuckled and swallowed and caught a breath. “And you know what’s going on with them, right?”

“What do you mean by ‘radiation’?” I had to know.

“Well, who wouldn’t squirm when they read Dirty Rotten ?”

“Squirm?”

“Or when Heck sees his wife Bonnie get decapitated in Flying Dreams.”

“I don’t know my subscribers,” I said, “But it’s all just fiction, right?”

“A Mere Slip of a Girl is fiction?”

“Maybe my office policies are too lax, Xenia. Maybe you should finally get an apartment. What are you saving up for anyhow?”

“A trip on the noon balloon to Rangoon?”

This reply caused me to catch up and say privately to myself, “Joe, this is just what you get for supposing you can muck amongst your characters out on the shop floor and still come out of it OK.”

 Then I noticed they had put the donuts out in plain sight.