Dear Miss Manners: Friends have made it very clear that they no longer answer their house phones, nor do they check their e-mail accounts.
My wife works out of town and we travel as a couple a great deal, for business and pleasure. In an effort to keep contact, we have resorted to personal notes.
The results have been disappointing at best. Often we are met with silence, and, on a number of occasions, with anger.
It appears we are to play telephone tag or text their cellphones with invitations or remembrances of major events in their lives. The passing of family, pets, jobs or other events can all be handled in less than 140 characters.
Have our lives become so busy and tied to a cellphone that an attempt to express sympathy, compassion or extend an invitation is to be derided as belonging to another era?
Gentle Reader: By your own account, you have resorted to personal notes not because you believe in a more graceful way of communicating, but rather because no one is answering your e-mails and home voice mails.
Miss Manners sympathizes and suggests that this form the basis of your response to those who object to your handwritten missives.
No taunting allowed
Dear Miss Manners: We are friends with recovering alcoholics who have been sober for more than 10 years. My husband says I should skip my usual glass of wine when dining with them.
