Frazz by Jef Mallett for November 26, 2021

Yeah, I communicate using email. And some of my kids respond. They mostly answer if we call, too. But today, one of them mentioned to me in all seriousness that they never phone out with their own (50ish) age cohort: they text. And the grandkids seem to do that exclusively. No email at all, and they very seldom answer their phones.

Texting is often well suited. And there’s a record.

Isn’t that the truth!

Happy HELLidays. Starting to day! The frenzy begins. Can’t wait until Dec 27 !

I’m kinda in the dark here. To what exactly is the young person referring? Older family sending requests for gift ideas? ?? She mentions ads then geezer mail. Bring the light, please.

What is this mention of the START of ads and sales? Talk about being out of touch.

There have been “Black Friday” specials going since mid-October. Constant talk of supply lines, shortages, no help available, and general “oneupmanship” has blurred the lines this year more than ever.

She says it in the past tense. “Traditionally begAn.” I think that has something to do with the point.

I get spam mail in Arabic and phone messages in Chinese. It’s a small world after all!

There’s the negative side of it sure but there was the going through the Sears catalog side of it as well.

It’s strange. I’m a senior citizen and I finally broke down and replaced my trusty flip with a smart phone just so I could text with my siblings. I honestly prefer email as it feels more like composing and sending a traditional message. Its just easier to say thing when I’m at my laptop and have a traditional sized keyboard to work with. That said, I go where my people are.

It took me awhile to realize that, by “geezer-mail”, this condescending young snot wasn’t referring to paper mail with envelopes and stamps. Apparently to her that’s the equivalent of cuneiform impressed with styluses on clay tablets.

There are more than enough Black Friday ads on my laptop and cell phone that I don’t miss the paper sort.

There is no modern form of communication that is free of advertising. Send a personal handwritten letter? There’ll be a message in the postmark. Face-to-face speech is still ad-free, but voice phone is only ad-free if it doesn’t go through a business’s phone system.

Newspaper ads, TV ads, email, Facebook, Insta, TikTok — I don’t think any generation can avoid what business journalists call “the fourth-quarter shopping season.”