Thanks! The good news is that I was able to sweet talk a helpful receptionist into getting me an appointment with the doctor tomorrow instead of a week from Thursday. She agreed it did not make sense for me to have just a sling for a week-plus given that the doctor who read the x-rays described my elbow as “unstable” and said that things “might possibly tear apart.” So she pulled a few strings and here we are! I have to travel across the county for the appointment but it’ll be worth it.
Sorry for the loss of your friend. It’s never easy.
Despite having a PPO (not an HMO). They gave me a list of places I could go; I chose the closest one; was told by the doc’s receptionist they had to do some precertification & that they would call me with the code. When she called me later & gave me the code I then called the hospital/outpatient scheduling & gave them the code & they had the rest of my info already in their system. Once I heard a month I thought about hanging up & calling somewhere else but wasn’t sure if it was a generic code or tied to that location so I just scheduled it for ASAP.
Just looked at my calendar, went to the doc on Tues Oct 28th so actually a little bit more than a month.
I absolutely HATE – with a passion that I can barely describe – the incompetent fuckers who were spun off by my gas company into a separate entity, and have been causing me no end of billing trouble for the rental water heater that came with this house.
The situation as it stands is that this 17-year-old water heater that’s been amortized many times over is still costing me nearly $50 a month. But the buyout cost is $100, after which I never have to deal with these fuckers ever again. No-brainer, right?
But when I tried to cancel, they threw a curve-ball at me (a curve-ball thrown, I might add, in such a heavy Indian accent that I had a hard time understanding what the hell they were saying). And the deal was that I could get a brand new water tank with no upfront charges, and the first 24 months would be free.
If they’re willing to do that, why would they not just do it in the first place instead of continuing to charge me $50 a month for the old one.
I don’t trust these fuckers. I bet that the monthly charge for the new tank will be enormous. The only way the deal makes sense is if I sell the house within 2 years and stick someone else with the cost, which is a shitty thing to do.
I think I’m just going to do a buyout on the old tank and take my chances on it possibly failing while I’m still in this house. OTOH, selling the house with an old hot water tank that might fail is also a shitty thing to do. But all kinds of things fail in houses past a certain age. Not my fault.
Decisions, decisions! My primary motivation at this point is that I just don’t want to deal with these fuckers any more. They’re dishonest and incompetent.
No, it wouldn’t be shitty at all. When you buy a house, you buy everything in it as-is, and if the hot water tank is old, that’s part of the deal. The new buyers then make the same choice as you; gamble on the old one lasting longer, or spending money on a new one.
I don’t know how it works up there, but my mom recently sold her house and I helped her with the paperwork. And part of the disclosure form is what shape the water system is in (including the tank). Assuming it’s similar in Canada, any new buyers are going into it with eyes wide open.
I agree that if you get a brand new one with a usurious monthly cost, that’s the sort of thing that might take a new buyer by surprise, and might be shitty.
If you sell the house in < 24 months & don’t disclose the contract would the new owner be obligated to pay it? What if they decide to outright buy a new one so they’re no longer using the item from the contract they didn’t sign?
If your neighbor, Mr. Katz, signs up for the same deal you do on the same day & then passes after six months*, the executor of the estate may not even know about said lease deal to disclose it. I know I wouldn’t think to ask about a deferred lease on part of the home’s ‘power plant’ & might not find the paperwork from a deceased relative if I didn’t know to go looking for it, even if they still had it.
* Aren’t you happy I killed off Katz rather than the pup?
Ever since I turned 55, my phone has been BLOWING. UP. with calls about “Missouri has just passed a new final expense fund…” or “Missouri has done this thing that entitles you to money” or “Missouri has done this other thing that entitles you to money.” It’s all recorded voices calling from spoofed numbers. I doubt Missouri has done anything at all that’s going to result in me getting any money for any reason, let alone something that nobody knows about it unless I hear about it from a recorded call from a spoofed number. Riiiight…..
Also, the sports-betting apps have been deluging me with ads. It’s annoying, to say the least, but I’ve used this to my advantage. They offer so much more in bonus bets when you place your first bet. So I bet $20, split the $400(!) in bonus bets they gave me so that I bet $100 on each of four possible outcomes in a two-leg parlay, and regardless of what happens on Sunday, I’ll be bringing home at least $100 of the house’s money plus my own money minus 91 cents (I bet $10 of my own money on each side of the same game). I never once, in my whole life, thought that I, of all people, would be in a situation where I could use math to my advantage, but here we are.
Jesus FUCK between my lovely mother, my idiot cat, and the WHOLY FUCK on the roads, plus the teenage coworkers and the asshole customers… can I just get a fucking break from ppl being awful?
I felt some time pressure to get a certain thing done at work, so I said I’d get it done in a week.
This is the thing I said I’d do: Open a file with 450 individual folders labeled A-Z with funder names, click into every individual file, locate any contact info I can find in the several enclosed documents, and then enter it all into a spreadsheet.
If you are thinking, “that sounds incredibly fucking tedious” you would be correct. What’s even better is that a lot of this stuff is twenty years old and the contact information is likely completely fucking useless.
And right there is why I always have Shazam handy on my phone. Now that some stores have replaced Muzak with “Deep Cuts from the Nineties that Almost Sound Familiar”, I find some cool music that way.
And, yes, I used to drive myself crazy trying to identify songs… and I realized that if I asked my more musical friend "What’s that song? The one that goes Doot-da-doot-doo-WAAAH-WAAAH?" one more time, he’d punch me.
And wolfpup is in Canada, where apparently people drink a Caesar as often as they drink tea or coffee in other places.
I guess it’s not that uncommon to rent or lease, and the pitch is usually that if you do that, they will cover maintenance and repairs. But from what I can tell, you end up spending a crap ton more that way, and the convenience of having someone to come maintain it is not even close to being worth it. It’s pretty much a scam.
We own a tankless water heater, and we’ve been here for just over 13 years. It has never given us a single problem, it just works.
I’m mystified by your mystification. Do you not have hot and cold running water where you live? A hot water tank is traditionally the device that heats water to make it hot, though “hot water heater” is the more generic term that also covers tankless heaters.
More often!
You nailed it! The tank leasing arrangement wasn’t my idea, it came with the house. It follows a storied tradition of fleecing the customer started by phone companies over a century ago, where the device is amortized over and over again and the monthly charge never goes down, but always up. In the first couple of years it’s a way of avoiding capital expenditure, and after that it just becomes a very expensive form of insurance.
The gas company screwed themselves by spinning off a separate company to handle this scam. In the past, when the cost was bundled with my natural gas bill, it was easy to overlook. Now the scam is glaringly obvious and it’s going to end tomrrow. I must admit that the offer of a brand new tank with no payments for 24 months is tempting since the current one is 17 years old, but as I said, I don’t trust these fuckers.
Also, they’re charging me even more for paper billing, which I never asked for. And when I asked the CSR I spoke with today, apparently located in Punjab, to stop the paper billing, she informed me in an almost incomprehensible accent that she “wasn’t authorized” to do that, and I needed to log in and navigate their nearly-useless website to cancel it. Tomorrow I will find out if the lady in Punjab is “authorized” to cancel my entire relationship with them.
(1) The title of this thread is ‘Twere instead of ’Twere. This smart-quote-being-stupid thing drives me NUTS.
(2) My dad is busy self-sabotaging himself into the grave. Partly denial, partly too much focus on certain things to the exclusion of others, and partly (I think) fear—accepting help means he really is at the last stage. Also, this aspect of existence just sucks: losing someone sucks, being about to lose someone sucks, and being someone whose death is around the corner super extra sucks.
I don’t know if it’s a regional thing, it may just be me. I call it a hot water “tank” because when I go down into the basement a large white tank is one of several large objects down there. Beside it is a large green object responsible for heating and cooling that I call the “furnace”, which may be an appropriate name in winter but a strange one in summer. In the summer, it’s “a green box with evaporator coils and a large fan”!
And late last summer, it was “a green box with evaporator coils and a large fan that poured water on my basement floor” making me think that the hot water tank had bust. But it was from the air conditioner wherein one of the condensation outlets was blocked and water was coming out of the emergency outlet. I think I cleared the blockage but air conditioning season was over before I could properly test it.
Owning a house sucks, even a fairly new one. I need an apartment with its own maintenance man. I’m getting too old for this shit. I can’t even safely get up on a ladder to replace my wired smoke detectors or even light bulbs myself without the aid of a high-priced Ukrainian electrician, a friend of my famed high-priced Ukrainian plumbers whose story I have regaled you with. And I still have to pay high-priced Snowplow Guy and, in the summer, not high-priced but still not free Lawn-mowing Kid.
