Before we broke down and got a landline (well, cable phone) last spring, our cell phones had been our lifeline to the world for more than five years. I grew accustomed to life without those pesky telemarketing calls, especially during meal time.

When that first salesperson called within hours of Time Warner installing our system, I didn’t know what to do. I sat there listening to their spiel and even threw in some “uh-huh’s.” My adept skills of quickly cutting in, politely saying “no thank you,” and then hanging up without a second thought were MIA. It was a combination of skills I learned over the years from my Italian, raised-in-the-Bronx, no-nonsense mom and my dad’s sweet (as in nice and ice tea) Southern roots. Luckily, it didn’t take long for me to slide back into my old ways. Read more…