About ten years old, well beyond the mandated builder’s warranty of five years.
I guess this is now basically a young version of “This Old House”, with things scheduled to break all over the place, in a new incarnation of The Standard Homeowner Nightmare. 
At least it’s nothing major … so far.
One of my friends bought a house in a new subdivision - so all of the houses were built at the same time. He said that in later years he would be standing in the hardware store waiting to show the clerk the part he brought in for replacement ---- and his neighbors would be there all holding the same part.
Why is it so hard to get all of my prescriptions on the same schedule? Why is it that I request a refill every month and they still cant get it in timely? Why do they expect me to call around to all of the locations in my large metropolitan area to find someone that has the prescription? Why is it that i order a refill online receive a confirmation to my email that they are working on it, a phone call that it is out of stock and then the refill disappears from their website that i ever requested it. Why do they not seem to understand that my doctor prescribed this medication to keep from getting sick and so need to get it filled quickly. Even with auto refill they have put some on backorder for weeks. I hate this pharmacy but I don’t know if any of the others would be any better. I am trying a different location in a more affluent neighborhood maybe that will improve the customer service.
during the pandemic’s worst days, the location I was using, had two lanes, the one closest to the building was for testing only and the other used the pneumatic tube to take my credit card and send back my prescription. So the pharmacy person told me that my package was too large to send through the tube so if I would drive to the entrance they would bring it out to me. No problem, dove around parked at the entrance and sat, waited about 30 minutes and no one showed up. Parked my car went inside, waited again for the pharmacy person to get to me and said I have been waiting out front and no one came with my prescriptions. The woman I had spoken to through the speakers aid, “you didn’t pay for it!” i said, “you told me to drive to the front, you didn’t say i had to pay through the tube and you left me sitting out front for half an hour knowing I had done exactly what you said to do!” “You have to pay for it first” “you didn’t tell me that, how am i supposed to know to do something other than what you said!” “you have to pay for it first!” AAARGH! finally the pharmacist came over to find out what the situation was, took my payment, gave me my bag and I left.
another time, they sent my credit card back through the tube without putting it in the bag or anything and it disappeared in the tube. I had to wait several days while they got someone out to look through the tube system to find it. they seemed a little irritated with me for calling everyday to see if they found my credit card, they finally did and I had to make another trip to retrieve it.
I started getting a bunch of alerts on my phone this morning about our data plan. Within a couple of hours it went from 50% used up to 75 then to 90. Yet when I go look at our account, it shows less than 50% used. We do not have an unlimited plan, we have 12GB a month, which should be more than enough to cover “normal usage” for just my wife and I.
The problem is that somehow, the Wi-Fi on her phone keeps getting turned off, and she doesn’t notice it. The other problem is that she uses her phone as the babysitter for our 6 y.o. grandson, who will watch YouTube videos until the cows come home if you let him. So he could easily eat up a big chunk of the data plan in an afternoon if the phone is off Wi-Fi.
I’ve tried setting data limits on her phone - which doesn’t work so great because the time frame in the data limits setting doesn’t match our actual billing cycle, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to change it so they match up. I’ve also turned off auto-play on videos and various other settings. Yet somehow nearly every month she manages to suck up our entire data plan.
I guess I should just bite the bullet and spring for an unlimited plan. It’s totally unnecessary but it’s about the only thing that will fix the problem.
(on iPhone – something similar will work on android)
Settings>mobile data>youtube ///off\\
problem solved
And why does the prescription-dispensing system insist on filling my maintenance medications 90 pills at a time? It’s almost as though they haven’t heard that a year is longer than 360 days . Every year my refill date gets backed up by five or six (leap years) days.
After one bad experience with a refill over the holidays, I try to schedule things so I’m covered from mid-November to mid-January. That’s awfully hard to do when the refill date keeps getting moved.
my insurance doesn’t do 90 day prescriptions but it doesn’t stop the spam from the pharmacy asking if I want them to check to see if they can do 90 day. I swear I get multiple phone calls every day for the pharmacy. Getting old and sick sucks but i guess not as much as dying.
I’ve done something similar on my phone for things like my book-reading apps, where downloading an entire book can eat up my data quickly if for some reason I lose WiFi. Instead I’ll get a helpful notification that I can’t use cellular data which prompts me to check my WiFi connection.
That saved us when our kid would be streaming skateboard videos all day every day, and use up the whole family’s data plan in two to three weeks.
In June I was put on a blood pressure medication. This is the first long term drug I’ve ever taken so I’m new to refills. The initial bottle I got had 90 pills with 1 refill. I got an email last week that my refill was ready but it was only for 30 pills. I called and asked why this was and was told that my initial prescription was 30 pills with 3 refills. I asked why I got 90 at the time and was told again that the prescription was for 30 and this was the last refill. I never got an answer for this discrepancy. I’d rather get 90 at a time but I can see that 30 would work better. And, of course, they will get my co-pay every month instead of every 90 days. I’ll see what my doctor says in a few weeks when I call to re-up.
I have to take 300 units of two different kinds of insulin each day. A few days ago I started the last vial of one of them, so I submitted a request for a refill. The pharmacy contacted my endocrinologist’s office, but never heard back from them. I called the office, asking why they didn’t approve the refill, and was told it was because I hadn’t seen the doctor in a while. Ok, except the doctor has retired. So when can I see the PA, whom I’d rather see anyway? Oh, she doesn’t have an opening till January. So, ok, I made an appointment for January. Does that mean I have to wait till January to get my insulin? I’ll be dead by then. Oh, we’ll have to get back to you on that.
No iPhone, Android. And I don’t want to completely block YouTube, I just don’t want it to play when not on Wi-Fi. I did eventually find where to set the date range on the data usage to match up with the billing cycle, so that helps.
The other thing is that the alerts were coming from “Verizon Family”, which was a separate service I subscribed to years ago when we had some of the grandkids on our account, and they were chewing up all the data. I thought I discontinued that service a few years ago when we finally got down to just me and my wife on the account. But apparently I’m still getting charged for it. And I have no idea who’s phone the alerts are for, because we never set either of our phones up on Verizon Family. But as far as actual data usage goes, it looks like we are good.
That is exactly what my suggestion does.
Sorry, I misunderstood. I’ll see if I can find a similar setting in Android.
Good luck – my first results googling this make it seem less easy than I thought. Which is a little bit surprising to me: I thought Android lets you customize more than iOS.
Oh, no. Having supported both in a professional capacity, Android is far more limiting. Which seems counter-intuitive but it’s the case. I used to joke at an old job that I should have a sign behind my desk saying, “Sorry, you need an iPhone to do that.”
I own devices with both OSes and enjoy them both but I feel far more constrained on an Android than iOS device. The only way my Android device feels less restrictive is that there are some apps I can install (like emulators) that I’d never get on my iOS devices without jailbreaking them.
I received two e-mails today asking me to delete a negative product review on Amazon.
The first was from a woman identifying herself as “Amazon Customer Service”, only it became immediately clear that she was affiliated with the seller. Apparently my review has caused grievous hurt to a family business, and I will receive a $20 Amazon gift card once I delete it.
I’m handicapped in that neither e-mail identifies the product in question; there’s a link to what’s supposed to be my review but I’m not about to click on it. I have a pretty good idea what it is, seeing that I’ve only slammed one product bought on Amazon this year (a less than savory food item picked up at the supermarket; my review is headlined “Only if you’re semi-starving and desperate”).
I wonder if offers like the $20 card are becoming more common since Amazon decided not to allow followup comments to reviews any more.
If I wanted to be a real meanie, I’d go back and edit my review to cite the attempted bribe, but the one time I did something similar for another purchase (mentioning that the seller had offered a sizable gift card in return for a 5-star review), Amazon responded by blocking my reviews for several months. Amazon apparently doesn’t care about such attempts to subvert its review system.
Might have been a pharmacy error. The first time I was put on a cholesterol medication, that bottle lasted and lasted; I had lost track of time. It turned out, they gave me a 90-dose bottle (prepackaged bottles of x tablets) vs the 30 dose.
Chances are your copay will be less for a 90 day supply, than for three 30-day supplies. You may also find that your health plan requires you to do that - it may even require you to go with mail-order medications as mine does. I miss when our coverage was through some version of Blue Cross - we could get the 90 day supply in person at the nearby CVS. Now that we’re through Aetna, we HAVE to get it via Dropped-em.
Chances are your cost to purchase antihypertensives for cash is less than your copay payment. My physician writes me a prescription which I use to purchase a full bottle of my various antihypertensives from a pharmacy for cash.
I go so far as to purchase 50 mg tablets of Atenolol and then take 1/2 daily to satisfy my 25 mg dose. Because one bottle of 50s costs just a dollar more than the same number of 25s, and they’re scored.
ETA: damn, I sound like a fucking cheapass. Heh, I just prefer to waste money on fun shit. Plus the American Health Care Fiasco.
Hah! Yeah, if it’s a generic, you might well pay less just paying cash, especially if it’s one of those where the big chains advertised “get a month’s worth for no more than 4 bucks!” a while back. And also depending on the prescription plan - if it’s one of those where “your copay is 3 bucks regardless” then you might well do better paying cash.
Mine is not - I pay a percentage of the price whatever it is. I’ve had the occasional scrip for less than 50 cents.