You can berate them about their employer’s lack of transparency in on-line transactions, and you can tell them there is a special corner in Hell for designing an electronic shopping cart with a mobius strip of payment options, gift credits and promo codes that are completely incompatible with one another, but it won’t change the fact that your merchandising therapist is chained in a cubicle farm with no window and no access to management, production, Information technology, much less an operational toilet.

This is one of those generational moments when you accept life has changed and etiquette is dead. When I am old and grayer, I will be telling the grandchildren, “In the good old days, you could feed the first representative you talked to his ass on a paper plate, now you have to go through six Live Chats, three minions, two middle managers, and a call center in an under developed nation, before you get cut off and try again, only to find out nobody is really responsible for anything, much less service.”

My sister and I communicate through intricately woven sarcasm laced in the trappings of not so subtle profanity. I can’t think of anyone who has called me Bitch face to face as many times as she. But, for her it is an expression of sisterly love, rather than the acceptable implication of a female, dog, wolf or otter, or the more familiar derogatory descriptor of a malicious woman. I can pass for the later, but not the otter.

Though we haven’t shared a bathroom in twenty years, we still spend excessive amounts of time behaving like juveniles and hazing one another uncontrollably. Sometimes with venom, other times with love but our commitment to constantly annoy is stronger than most oaths of office or vows of celibacy.

Once a long drawn out affair involving endless messages and inappropriate birthday gifts, we’ve resorted to brevity being she’s employed and trying to raise a family and stuff, and I’m too lazy to orchestrate the elaborate ruses when simple ones suffice.

So text messaging and picture mail it is. It’s amazing how caustic you can be when your too cheap to buy vowels. I’ve tried to evolve in a kinder, gentler me refraining from frat boy humor that dominated our youth, and instead to tried share genuine moments of joy from my life like this:

this:

or this:

But the joy of life’s little moments escape the sensibility of an esteemed member of the educational community charged with seeing that our nations youth are corrupted as little as possible. In her classroom, pictures of fresh baked muffins are the technological equivalent of shaving your initials into the fur of your neighbor’s pedigreed golden retriever, and then crapping on his doorstep.

So maybe, just maybe, she wears her heart on her sleeve just a wee bit in the classroom, but who wouldn’t when faced with a diet coke and a school lunch tray. It’s no wonder the Dick and Jane posse think I suck, because kids instinctively know that teasing is just mean. Nonetheless they manage to grow up somewhat adjusted and quickly adaptable to the unappreciated artform that is behaving like a dick, or better yet setting up others to do their dirty work for them.