this american life

I'll admit it, I am way behind on getting on this bandwagon. Yesterday I listened to my very first episode of This American Life. Now that I have my new iPod Nano, I figured that I would download a few free podcasts from iTunes. I'd heard good things about this radio show but had never listened to it before. It was a lot of fun. This week's podcast was a re-airing of an episode from 2003 called The Middle of Nowhere. It featured a brief intro about an area in the Pacific Ocean, the size of Texas, where a great deal of that ocean's trash floats to and collects. Evidently there are five or so of these areas in the world's oceans. Who knew? The first act of the show dealt with a tiny island nation named Nauru. It used to be this lush island that was pillaged and for the last several years has been used as a sort of halfway-island for Iraqi and Afganistani refugees. My favorite, the second act, dealt with one of the producer's of the show and her struggle dealing with MCI and it's customer relations help-line. It had me laughing quite a lot. Who hasn't had to deal with the awful customer support folks and the long amount of time on hold.