Is it me or old age or what? Not only are the rolls of toilet paper getting narrower and smaller and my butt getting bigger, the apples in the supermarket are on steroids, forcing me to pay for more than I want to consume in one sitting.

The bottom line, my cost per poop has gone up substantially.  

You know what else ticks me off the large, round container prunes come in. You struggle to get the cover off the lid, pull up the plastic covering with the tiny, tiny tab, and finally open it up and wallah you look down this cannon of cardboard and find a third of the prunes missing. Who ate these prunes? Because prunes have a high fiber calling in my life, I put up with this, one, they taste good, and two, enough said.

Now let’s talk about more apples, not the eating kind, the technology kind. Between my wife and I, we have a bushel of these, an I-Mac computer, a Mac Pro laptop, two I phones, and two I pads. These are the real rotten apples. Do not get me wrong their the Rolls Royce of communication tools; however, they turn on you every few years. Either the operating systems need updating, you need more speed and memory to run the new apps, or you need the higher resolution retina display. Do we own these machines, or do they own us? 

I am venting because, back a few years ago, I am sitting in my new office waiting for my internet and phone installation, one of two high-tech monopolies, is now well over 3 hours late. 

When most of my peers are retired, I’m still working as a marketing/branding consultant, and yes, the irony is I have gone from creating with magic markers to computers. At the time I moved from a home office filled with noisy phone conversations, a 7lb. Maltese that screams and yelps at anything that moves (I tell clients she is my office manager), Gardner’s who cut the lawns with mowers that sound like 747’s and friendly neighbors popping in just when I am on the phone with a client… to the peace and tranquillity of my own office. 

However, my next-door business neighbor is a trucking delivery service, complete with a women dispatcher whose language is replete with words that rhyme with truck. 

So now, six hours later, the internet/telecommunications installation genus shows up, apologizes profusely, and says I will have you up and running in an hour. The building is already equipped and wired with its router boxes. He is down the hall for eternity comes back with the bad news, he can’t use these routers. We need to run a cable across the attic to the other side of the building, climb into the Chiropractors office ceiling and hook it up in his area. Ok…go to it; no, I am not a cable installation guy. I’ll have a specialist come in first thing in the morning. The first thing in high tech language is 5 pm, the next day when two cable people on overtime finish at 8 pm.

Give me a Crouqill pen, some parchment paper, the pony express, let me grow a beard, work in a robe, and wear hand-sewn underwear, and i’ll be a happy communicator.

Ten years ago, my wife and I traded corn beef sandwiches for corndogs, Bob Dylan for Willie Nelson, and moved to Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, just outside of Nashville from Long Island, New York. So little by little, we got with the program. You-all unapologetically spills out in some of my conversations, as well as adopting southern politeness and demeanor not commonly found in the streets of Brooklyn. However, all this uncalled-for unsolicited politeness gets on my nerves sometimes.                    

Let’s take Lowe’s, for example. Up north, greeters were far and few in-between. Generally, they were hiding in the isles looking busy, and when you found one, you received the famous who me, “what, what, what” look. Down here, you are greeted instantly with an army of red vested smiling faces, all standing in formation across from a long row of registers, to break through the line, you either have to ask a question or be aggressive with your shopping cart. Now you’re up the aisle, need to ask a question, and all the red vests have abandoned ship.

Before you get to Lowe’s, you pass a sea of box restaurants all couponing for your business, with greeters trained like robots, overly solicitous, however well-meaning and sweet. But please let me eat my fried chicken tenders in peace, don’t come by every 5 minutes and ask me how’s it tasting when I have a mouthful and complaining to my friends about being interrupted while I’m complaining. 

And here is the biggie…stop asking me where I come from. In response I usually say, I was born in Tennessee; however, my parents sent me to Brooklyn for elocution lessons.

In all fairness, I need to admit; the volunteer state is slowly changing my blood pressure. When I go back to New York or visit our kids in California, I get honked at and given some very explicit hand signals for driving too slow. As well as waiters giving me the evil eye when I linger too long at their table. Or holding up an elevator to let another passenger in or greeting strangers with a smile.

So now I say thank you, over and over again, to whomever serves me at my new adopted home, the state of Tennessee.

Bless your hearts.

Mike Rosen