By
William A. Gralnick
Florida and roaches (Palmetto Bugs, if you wish) go together. The Gralnicks have at least two family lore stories involving them.

We at least have a nation
On a vacation trip to Sarasota, my parents rented a car. Apparently it had been on the lot a while. My dad turn on the motor and then the air conditioning. The fan starting blowing and with it, like in Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” wave of roaches came flying out of the AC vents. The like girls in the movie “Saw,” mom, totally unhinged, fled from the car screaming like she had been stabbed.
Mom was like that. one day in the moutains the house cat took a liking to her. To win her affection, it hunted a mouse, which it presented to her like a prize, dropping it in her lap. Same reaction.
Then it was my turn. I had rented an apartment along a canal in Freeport, LI. Apartment renting was not my strong suite. One time I rented an apartment that had no closets. Truth. This apartment had as a distinguishing feature a column between the living room and bedroom. At first blush it was quaint. At night, it could be painful.
One night, restlessly asleep, I was awakened by a scratching sound. It wasn’t exactly scratching but I don’t have another word that gets closer. Maybe it was the cat using the scratching post. Then, as my mind cleared, I remembered that I was allergic to cats and didn’t have one. So I listened.
After a while, my ears zeroed in on the location of the illusive sound. It was just the other side of the column in the living room. It got up to investigate. I didn’t turn on the lights and slowly felt my way to the column both for security and avoiding smashing my head into it. As I crossed the imaginary boundry and entered the living room, I heard that I was in the right place. The sounds was above my head. I reached to the wall, found the light swtich and turned it on. It was Hitchcock time again.
Above me, on the ceiling were so many roaches that only in a spot here and there could I see the white of the ceiling. There must have been ten thousand of them. Also truth. Startled by the light, the roaches began to race back and forth in a tightly packed black/purple herd from one end of the living room to the other. So tightly packed were they that in their panic they began to knock fellow roaches to the floor. Think the Parachute Jump at Coney Island seen from a great distance. SMall creatures dropping from ceiling to floor and then taking off all around me.
I was not surprised to learn that roaches are one of the few of G-d’s creatures that will survive a nuclear attack and be around to restart Noah’s work. They will be here forever. And that brings me to emails.
One of the things that the current youthful generation can’t seem to digest is this: you write it on a electronic gizmo, it will be there for the roaches to read after the war. One of the things, among many, that make me crazy about emails and text message, is there quantity.

dirt brings roaches–everyone brings emails
According to the Big G (Google), the average person gets 121 emails at home every single day. That’s plus what the person gets at work and doesn’t count texts. I am not average. I average about 200 a day. One of my worst feeling about vacations is coming back to a thousand or more emails that are just waiting for me to deal with.
If I am any indication, I read about 2% of them. The rest aggravate my digital arthritis as I hit delete, delete, delete over and over again. Yes one can “unsubscribe” but since most of them I have no idea how I got subscribed to in the first place, however many I unsubcribe from with be replaced with more new ones numbering greater than the number I x’d out.
In setting up the marketing for my newest tickle your ribs book (George Washington Never Slept Here/Amazon.com kindle or paperback)

sorry, oh so sorry…couldn’t resist
I called a friend how owns a data management company. “Should I buy email lists?” She asked me how many emails a day I got and how many I read. The answer to my question became crystal clear.
The wife and I had a semi-horrendous stay at a Florida resort. I had a page and a half of complaints, which to poured into an eloquent “you should be ashamed of yourself” missive to the GM. As I sat at my computer, I rememeber a political friend telling me that when her Congressman get a letter, like a piece of paper in an envelope that has a stamp on it, it gets read immediately. So I typed my little heart out and didn’t hit send. I printed it and did the envelope/stamp thing.
We got a refund. There seems to be a message there–at least from my perspective.
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