In addition to complaining about whatever I please, recounting stories of minimal importance, extending past the confines of my living room in my quest bore others with my vacation pictures, and a slue of other utterly disconnected and random topics (if one can call them topics), I’ve decided to add “tech blog for the not-so-advanced” to the list, because this dood is SO my hero. Comments are closed on that post so, since I can’t say it there, I figured I’d say it here. Plus, maybe some small percentage of my readers (so a small percentage of my small number of readers would be, what, uhhh…. 0.15 of a person?) will think I WANTED TO KNOW HOW TO DO THAT TOO! NOW YOU‘RE MY HERO!

But anyway, in keeping with the (see above re: disconnected and random topics), let me now take the opportunity to tell you what bothers me. Or rather, since a lot of things probably bother me, what REALLY bothers me.

It REALLY bothers me that, most often, at least when dealing with large bureaucracies and corporations, the only point at which you are provided good service is when you turn into a giant, whiny, entitled brat.

FOR EXAMPLE.

I recently spent a lot of time on the phone with Medicare trying to resolve one client’s account. When I say recently, I mean more like over the course of some five months. And no, I am not exaggerating. And what happens when you call Medicare, because I know you’ve been dying to find out, is that you wait on hold (and…wait…yes…in fact I think I might have mentioned the hold music) you wait on hold until someone answers the phone. And that someone is somewhere in a different time zone and is one of eight bazillion people answering that phone number, none of whom have identification codes or callback numbers so it’s not like you ever speak to the same person twice. And they ask you for information. And you fax it. Except it takes about three days to fax any information to them because they have ONE FAX NUMBER. For all of Medicare. Just the ONE. And then you finally get your information through. But they never “find” it. Or it never gets processed. Or whatever. So you send it again. And then you wait the sixty day processing period because if you try calling (hold music) before the sixty days are up “just to check on it”, you are simply told that it won’t register in the system until the processing people have processed it. And that takes 60 days. And no, they don’t have any incoming phone lines in the processing room of processingness, so you can’t speak with them.

And then, when sixty days have passed, you call again (hold music) to check on it. And they say it’s processed and in the mail and to wait a few more days. And then you call back (hold music) after a few more days. And they say to wait a FEW MORE. And you say no, please send it again. And they say, ok please hold (hold music), but then they come back and say it’s not in the digital system yet so they can’t send it again. So please wait a few days and call back.

And then you wait a few more days and call back (still with the hold music and the going crazy, by the way, in case that pattern hasn’t presented itself to you yet), and THIS person tells you that, oh…no…actually that thing that they said was completed on time (on time being a relative concept when it takes 60 days to process a letter) and already in the mail was just a copy of something they’d already sent and the thing you are waiting for hasn’t been processed yet because instead of what you said in the letter (two and a half months ago) about charge one and charge two, you have to PHYSICALLY CROSS OUT AND CIRCLE, respectively, the charges you’re talking about on the ledger and send it back again because describing the charges by the name listed on the ledger is just too confusing, apparently. So please start again.

So (are you still reading?) you circle and cross out with fury and re-fax (another three days to get that through). And then you call back (hold music) and are told to wait the 60 days for processing at which point you say

(in your head) HOLD. THE FUCK. UP. (and out loud, with only the tiniest edge of insanity) May I please and ever so kindly speak with your supervisor? This dude assures you at least four times that while you can speak to his supervisor, she will have no ability to speed this process along for you, but you insist and so you are asked to hold (hold music) and you wait a full twenty minutes before….

A saccharine sweet lady gets on the phone, apologizes profusely, listens to your saga, asks you to hold (hold music) while she checks out the issue, comes back and says, “Actually, ma’am, I see that none of these charges are related. I will get out a letter to you to that effect this afternoon.”

And you receive that letter later that week.

And would you believe me if I said that that is the SHORT version of the story? The version where I don’t even bother to mention at least five other times that I called (hold music hold music hold music hold music hold music)?

And so MY QUESTION is, people, my QUESTION TO THE WORLD, is how much of a dent could we take out of the national debt if we were to replace:

1. The money spent on wages for roughly ten (I’m being generous here) phone calls, roughly seven minutes each (including data entry), PLUS
2. The money spent on all the phone lines for people like me to HOLD…again, PLUS
3. The money spent on health care for people like me who just might go crazy from the experience

TIMES the number of people who have had this experience (raise your hand)

with

A small fleet of people with half a brain who evaluate and handle (simple…such simple) issues as they arise and in a timely manner without creating a paper trail storm of useless notes that convey no information at best.

How much? I dare you to guess.

Except I do have some words. Here they are.

I go up to cover the receptionist’s afternoon break and she has a news page up with a picture of Michael Jackson. I shudder at the frighteningly disfigured “face” on the screen. She tells me had had a heart attack.

My reaction: indifference

I do what a good little socially acceptable person does and crack the requisite jokes at his expense. You know the routine. Black to white. Fake nose. Child molestation. Right down the line.

Another coworker flies out of his office and announces, “Michael Jackson just died!”

My reaction: get totally fucking wigged out

I mean, that’s kind of intense, no? When a person who is that famous (read: well connected and wealthy) can’t survive passed 50, it just reminds you exactly how mortal we are. And besides that, there’s just something a little weird when an icon dies. It’s TOTALLY intense. There are debates already on the radio between this person calling him a pop icon whose influences have reached far and wide and that person claiming he’s a psycho. This really rubs me the wrong way, because of all the pointless arguments in the world…. Seriously. It’s like having an argument about whether someone was tall or has blue eyes. Like you can’t be both.

::shrug::

But all in all it’s just a little surreal. It’s like announcing Mickey Mouse has died.

I was going to marry Michael Jackson when I was six. Go ahead and crack all the jokes you want about how he would have been willing (but note that I was never a young boy), but the dude made some good music and he is a household name.

A little surreal for sure.

So, I get these headaches, right? I started getting them a little over a year ago. Since then, there have been a small handful of times when I have hit a bad streak and they won’t let up for an extended period which, I would argue not surprisingly, drives me absolutely mad. And when this happens, I become unconditionally desperate to find any kind of solution. Take these supplements? Fine. Lie on this special pillow? Okay. Climb the nearest tree and yodel? Consider it done. Rub newt testicle on my eyeballs? I started last week.

I recently found myself in one of these ruts. The constant, mild undercurrent was stubbornly unending and so I started trying some new avenues. (It turned out that the second I finished my last pre-vacation day at work, this dissipated, which brings some interesting things to light, but encompasses a whole other story under a whole other rock which is currently being left unturned for practical reasons). I ended up seeing a naturopath who recommended, among other things, that I take a food sensitivity blood test which would test for antibodies built up against certain foods. Basically, an unofficial allergy test.

I was given a list of foods to have in my system come test time, and off I went. The list included several dairy items, and a long list of vegetables, fruits, and grains/legumes. Some were knocked off in the normal course of things, and others I tabled for after vacation. I wasn’t going to spend my precious days off stressing about finding a restaurant that offered lima bean pâté or amaranth crackers. Sounds reasonable, no?

And suddenly, somehow, it was already Sunday. Test is Tuesday. My neurotic brain wheels start gliding with ease – doing what they do best – and I decide I have to have eaten all these things by Monday night so I have at least 12 hours for my body to process the food and get it into my blood. I run to Whole Foods and attempt to find as many compound foods as possible to knock down the increasingly heavy basket. I get home and hack into a thousand vegetables and fruits to get just a few bites worth, relegating the bleeding corpse remnants to the fridge to be dealt with later. I now have the nut cup, the bean/grain cup, four various cheese sandwiches, a fruit salad, and a vegetable salad. It is an exceedingly daunting sight.

I am so not even hungry.

I select the salad bowl for the evening as it is the most intimidating item and stare it down like an arm wrestling rival. I WILL win, dammit.

I sit down with a book and force feed myself, little by little, the whole everloving thing. I am supposed to be trying to catch up on sleep, but I’m still eating at one a.m. If the literal jokes boys over at SNL need a new skit, they should try this one: I’m literally CRAMMING. Guffaw. Get it? Cramming my mouth with food to prepare for a test? Guffaw guffaw.

::sigh:: Ridiculous. And the worst part? When I still can’t sleep at 3 a.m. because I’m so uncomfortably full, the only thing I can think is:

For fuck’s sake…if I throw all of this up, I just have to eat it again tomorrow…

So as we’ve already covered numerous times, as in here and here, I have The Anxious. Therefore, one can imagine that when I landed a job involving reviewing medical records which highlight all the sometimes horrifically life changing things that can happen to you when you are:

1. dumb,
2. in a motor vehicle, or
3. mortal

I was a tad bit concerned that it may accentuate my angsty qualities.

Turns out, it really hasn’t. Some days I review exceedingly unpleasant things (whether gross or depressing), but I don’t seem to be any worse for the wear. All I do is cluck at their unfortunate positions.

Like the other day I happened to be working on a file that involved a story that goes like this:

Once upon a time there was a house.
And at that house there was a party.
And at that party at that house there was a keg.
And at that keg at that party at that house there was a minor.

And then bad stuff happened.

The end.

And I’m sitting at my desk, tksing and thinking why, oh why, silly kids did you do something so irresponsible which had such dire consequences? I’m making the trumpet noise the adults make in Charlie Brown.

And then later that night I was looking at this and thinking oh you silly college kids with your crazy drunk antics, as I shook my head and my old-lady beaded spectacle chain swayed back and forth in step (I don’t really have a spectacle chain).

And THEN I suddenly had a flash and remembered that I have an entire section of a photo album from college that documents the sports we created. I wasn’t drunk in any of said photos because I’m a disgustingly boring rarely-drinker, but I would argue, probably to the detriment of my rep more than anything, that I have done some fabulously stupid things withOUT the aid of intoxicating substances.

We had an activity called Mud Sliding which is perfectly self-explanatory and involved going to find hills on campus after a good rain. I will note that the jeans “prewash” in the bathtub after said sport turned many gallons of water into chocolate milk and so I think I only participated once due to the ensuing hassle.

But the other sport we invented was pure genius if you ask me. In college they hand out free condoms and free lube samples like water and we were thinking, “What – besides the obvious – will we do with all of this lube?”

And it just so happens that when you live in the dorms the bathroom floors are all tile and slope gently to the center where there is a drain.

And it just so happens that lube luging was born:

Step 1: Squirt all the samples you have on the bathroom floor.*
Step 2: Take off shoes and socks.
Step 3: Roll up pants.
Step 4: See how long you can avoid getting a concussion.

*Only use water-based lube, because if you go to the sex shop and purchase a whole bottle of whatever lube is cheapest and it happens to be silicone-based, you will require soap to wash it off and down the drain, and you probably won’t get it all and one of your suite-mates might slip and get mad at you. I’m just saying. Hypothetically.

And I’m not saying that lube luging is anything like getting wasted and very, very broken at a house party, but I AM saying that I used to do fun, weird, slightly stupid, nonsensical things. Moi. What happened to that? Is this me getting old or is it inevitable? Does crazy fun exist after school or is it doomed to wither and die in the post grad phase?

Oh my god.  Am I going to start telling these stories:

Me: You will not BELIEVE what HAPPENED. It was INSANE!
Them: What happened?
Me: I was alphabetizing my spices, and for a second, I put CILANTRO before CHIVE…
Them: Uh-huh…
::silence::
Them: And then what?
Me: No. That’s it. Isn’t it CRAZY!?

I’m going to be sick.

The other night, don’t ask me what possessed him, but the boy decided to find this. And we proceeded to stay up way, way, way too late playing it. And for some unknown and unforeseeable reason, it was some of the most hilarious fun I’ve had in quite some time. I mean, the little program even has that part when you have to “flip the disk”. Remember those disks? The large, black floppies that seem to be just the perfect size and hardiness to be a high school punk band’s CD sleeve for their self-released, self-titled first album? Of course, you don’t actually get to flip a real disk, but still…

And the whole thing is just so utterly and pathetically entertaining. What with the shrill, piercing music, and the “would you like to look around” which, if you answer Y allows you the joys of surveying a stream and grassy hillside displayed with, in total, about six pixels.

Such beauty.

We went as carpenters at first, which is the equivalent of level medium. And do you remember how HARD the damn game is? We thought we had plenty of everything, but we kept getting lost, bandits stole all of our clothes (literally ALL – we assume we were naked), and the kids kept breaking their legs or getting the measles. And THEN we ran out of food and, literally every day, had to try trading for food (mostly useless) or hunting. We took turns with the hunting. No sexism in this frontier family.

And we both sucked. Royally. We attempted to shoot through rocks, turned our generic avatar left to shoot a buffalo licking our right elbow, succeeded in bringing home a squirrel (“You have brought home one pound of meat!”) and other such hunting atrocities. We’d never survive back in the day.

And then on the few occasions when we were actually successful in killing something, it would be over one hundred pounds and the narration would inform us that we could only carry the first hundred pounds back to the wagon. So there we are cussing out the kids for not helping and wondering why on earth it never occurs to us to come back for the second batch of meat when we know we’re just going to starve again in 20 days (if we’re eating on the bare-bones plan). And with the amount of trail losing going on, 20 days was, like, every five seconds.

Ridiculous.

So about this time I realize I haven’t eaten any dinner in real life and go to make myself a bagel. I’m not gone five minutes and I hear from the bedroom in a matter-of-fact voice:

Moe has the measles.

Moe is dead.

…

Louinda has a broken leg.

Louinda is dead.

…

Jebediah has cholera.

Jebediah is dead.

…
…
…

Everyone is dead.

I am livid. This is a CHILD’s game. Come on people. We can do this. I rearrange the large fleece mumu I wear for pjs when it’s cold in the house and settle in.

It’s time to get down to business.

This time, we’re going as bankers. This time, we’re buying HELLSA food. Like, maxing out the food option. We bought HELLSA sets of clothes. Lots of parts to trade later if we need them.

Start out on meager meals. Start on strenuous pace. None of this meandering shmeandering.

And folks…we just FLEW. It must have taken us an hour the first time to go two thirds of the way and then die. The second time, we got to Oregon in probably 20 minutes. No fooling around. We didn’t hunt once.

Lesson learned? Be rich. Life is much, much easier when you’re rich.