So Ann says, “I went over my minutes last month.” You what? “I went over my minutes. Last month.” Really? How many minutes do you get? “Three-thousand.” After I wiped away the coffee that shot out my nose, I cleaned off the laptop and started doing the math. That’s a lot of minutes. It’s fifty hours, or if you prefer, two days and two hours. It’s a week at work these days —and seven nights worth of sleep. It’s a hundred episodes of Thirty Minute Meals.
I don’t think anyone has ever described me as “chatty,” especially not in regard to the phone. My calls are monosyllabic affairs of cryptic guy-speak: “Yeah. Uh-huh. Maybe. You got that right.” But Ann is obviously another story. She loves to talk and people love to talk to her. Sure, some of it is work, but mostly it’s what she does best, being a good friend to the people she cares about.

Maybe I can give her some of my minutes.