“Come on, you stupid thing, work!”

            “Why do you have to be so difficult!”

            This was the one-sided conversation I was having with my cell phone when it refused to send a text message.

            After holding the phone closer to my mouth and yelling louder, I realized just how ridiculous I sounded. I was having a conversation with something that could never talk back.

            I do that quite a bit.

            Talking has always been one of my strongest qualities, if I can define talking a good bit of the time as a quality. My mom said I started young. I begged for a Chatty Kathy doll when I was a little girl and it was my favorite doll.

             My relatives also knew how much I loved to talk. One afternoon when my great-grandfather came to visit, he watched me for a while, stood up, put his hat on, and walked out mumbling something about someone being a talking machine.

            That machine’s been running for quite a while, grand-dad.

            So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I can talk to anything if there’s not a person around.

First, there’s our dog.

            I realized how much I talk to her when I read an article about how dog owners tell their dogs good-bye when they’re leaving and when they’ll be back. The article pointed out that dogs can’t tell time, so it’s pointless to tell the dog your travel plans.

            Doesn’t matter. Whenever I leave Channell in the morning, I scratch her behind her ears as I tell her what I’ll be doing all day, what errands I have to run and when I’ll be back.

            She never answers, but I think she understands me.

            I also talk to other drivers when I’m in my car. They can’t hear what I’m saying, but that doesn’t stop me from pointing out everything they’re doing wrong.

            Like to the person in front of me at the ATM machine.

            “You should’ve had that card out of your wallet before you got up to the machine,” I’ll mutter. And then when they drop their card and have to put their car in park, retrieve their card and start all over, I’m questioning their IQ level.

            I also freely dispense driving tips to other drivers, even though the windows in my car are rolled up.

            My favorite lines to yell out at the top of my lungs are:  “Are you kidding me!” and, as they go roaring around me:  “Somebody better be bleeding in that car.”

            My sons shake their heads and remind me that what I’m saying is pointless. The other person cannot hear me.

            Doesn’t matter. I still talk to trucks, SUVs and 18-wheelers.

            That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

            I talk to my pants. “You buttoned last week – what’s wrong with you today?!”

            I talk to the lock on the front door. It tends to stick, so I pretty much yell at that lock with an added kick at the bottom of the door to make sure that lock knows I mean business.

            I talk back to the radio announcer in the morning.

            “Is that all you can talk about is bad news?” I’ll grumble as Steve Inskeep reports on wars, famine, politics and the persecuted.

            With the television remote control, I mostly call out “Where are you?” It never answers, but I have hope because now the remote has voice command. Maybe one of these days I’ll yell “Where are you?” and I’ll hear a mechanical voice answer “Under the couch cushion.”

            But of all the things I talk to that can’t talk back, my dog is the best. She listens without interrupting, she wags her tail when I sound excited, she doesn’t repeat any gossip I tell her and she models great behavior when trapped with a Chatty Kathy – just keep your mouth shut.

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.