While carrying my baby on the stairs today, I slipped and fell. Kid’s OK but I may have cracked my tailbone – or at least bruised the hell out of it and an arm and a leg.
Aaaaand I found out shortly after that that my health insurance (and that of my husband and kid) may have been canceled due to incompetence by the “benefits administration company”. It’s old stale insurance left over from the job I got laid off from more than a year ago, carefully nurtured with a very expensive COBRA continuation. I’ve had cancer twice plus migraines and a kaput thyroid and depression and a hell’s handbasket of other issues – so if I can’t convince them to fix their own mistake and reinstate us, we are very, very fucked.
What the frak are the people upstairs listening to?! It sounds like nursery songs sung by that happy jolly Russian guy. And so help me Og, you better be training that kid to be a professional dancer, if I have to hear him thumping around for hours at a time.
P.S., emma, you have my sympathy. Although I’m also glad the kid’s okay.
That sounds like the kind of thing that would make a great news story. If they don’t follow through, your local news sources (TV and/or newspaper) probably have people you can contact for juicy tidbits like this, which would probably push the company to set things right.
We’re talking about benefits administration here. I’m not sure “right” is part of their dataset.
However, I talked with a nice young man in a call center in India about all this today and he gave me directions for an appeal. He did a better job of sounding sincerely bad about my situation and wanting to help than he did sounding American, despite instructing me to call him “Joe” and wishing me a very very nice Thanksgiving. Joe assured me that in his experience, 99% of appeals are granted within what sounds like a semi-secret appeals grace period that I’m still in.
I wouldn’t trust any information from the company who will be obliged to pay you benefits if they reinstate your policy. I would fully expect them to mislead me so as to minimize my chances of winning.
Yes, I’m paranoid, but paranoia has saved my butt on many occasions.
If I were you, I’d be on the phone with my state’s insurance commission. Depending on how pro-consumer your state is, this is something that will get their attention and make it more likely that they will at least follow the rules rather than pretend that they don’t exist.
Regardless of what the company says or promises, I would file a complaint and pursue it in parallel. If they cave, you can always withdraw the complaint or just fail to pursue it. If not, you save valuable time by having the process already started.
I am tired of all these people who think taking a family vacation means taking a vacation from being a parent. I am not a parent but I have talked to many people who are and they all said they don’t recall being offered any vacation days on that job.
This is the third time in a year and a half where I have applied for an internal job that I am basically overqualified for, only to be told as their reason for not giving me the job that I don’t have enough experience in an area where I have more professional experience than any other applicant (the second time where I had more professional experience than all other applicants combined).
After the first time, I told you that I considered this a slap in the face and a personal insult that you would tell me that I didn’t have enough experience, then hiring someone with almost no experience at all.
Now you’ve pulled this insult on my intelligence twice more. Three times is the charm. I get it. You’re assholes and egotistical morons. You’re telling me that you will never promote me or even move me laterally. I’ll give up now and stop trying for anything but another job with another company. You’re going to hire your unqualified favorites every time, and you’re going to live with > 100% annual turnover in those jobs just so that you CAN keep hiring your little favorites. And sweet jebus, this is in BAD economic times. I can’t wait to see karma chew off your genitals in good economic times, when you can’t hire people of the quality you get now for your shitty jobs, and you’re seeing 500% annual turnover because people aren’t willing to put up with your bullshit.
I thought I was going to be okay with this. The SO is working on Thanksgiving, no problem - shift differential is a big deal, and it’s only 9:30 - 6:30 so plenty of time for me to cook a small late feast. I had it all planned - relaxing all day, puttering around, being relaxing about the meal (which is easy since he’s veggie - lots of sides with a Cornish hen for me and a veggie loaf for him, his choice).
But no. The Fates will not allow. Sunday morning I awoke in such excruciating pain I thought my eyes were going to burst. Hospitalization ensued, from Sunday morning to Tuesday afternoon (TMI WARNING - ruptured hemorrhagic ovarian cyst). I’m fine, but still in some pain and moving slowly. And totally not sure if I can (or want to) cook stuff. And he’s fine with that. He just wants me well and happy, and if that involves eating canned chili and drinking red wine on the couch while watching Eddie Izzard, then joy to the world.
But my friends are posting their feast plans and meals and arrangements all over Facebook and various message boards and talking about their gatherings - and it is just making me so very fucking sad that I can’t have at least a little of that.
So fuck you ovaries, and fuck you mainstream Thanksgiving expectations that I totally thought I had shucked off years ago (but now apparently are rearing their ugly heads like crabgrass), and fuck you my own sense of Calvinism that tells me I should get my still-in-pain shuffling-around ass out of bed and cook tomorrow.
And fuck the hospitalization (and the Dilaudid, for which I give thanks, and can totally see why people abuse that stuff because…yea) for making me miss the fourth episode of “The Walking Dead,” and I can’t find when it’s going to be rerun or where I can watch it online so I can participate in the discussion on Cafe Society.
So make with the fucking watching links, fellow zombie-loving Dopers, you fuckers.
Yeah, neither would I. Though a tiny part of me holds onto the hope that “Joe” actually might have given me the straight dope, just because he’s so far removed from the actual paying of benefits himself. I mean, a guy in a call center in India is probably getting screwed by the company-as-employer almost as much as I am by the company-as-service-(non)-provider.
I found several descriptions online of this kind of thing happening with this company (ADP, if anyone’s curious) repeatedly, so while I’ll consider the whole shame-them-into-doing-right thing, I’m not holding my breath. And I may contact the state insurance commission. Not holding my breath for that one either. The state consumer protection agency was no help at all when I had trouble with AT&T a few years back.
My dad pointed out that the COBRA coverage runs out in five months anyway, so our impending fuckedness is kind of relative. I’m looking into all the options I can think of, including state poor-people medical assistance. I hadn’t thought about it, but now with the kid and all, we must qualify as officially poor people, as underemployed as we are. (sigh)
My ass hurts a lot less today. I don’t think I cracked anything* (ha! ha! gettit? “crack”?? I kill me)* after all. And today my husband spilled almost-hot soup all over the kid and failed to hurt him that way either. We must be running down some kind of list.
I had an ovarian cyst rupture - I crawled to the bathroom and just lay there for a while, then I crawled back to bed, sure I was going to wake up dead the next morning. It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced before or after. You have my sympathy - take it easy on yourself.
Yes, ridiculous refinance bank I will send you ANOTHER copy of my proof of hazard insurance, I know that it must be really hard to keep track of the SEVEN other copies I have sent you at your requests that come at a rate of one every three days. But no, I will not pay another $55 so you can obtain an eighth copy. I’m no longer sure I want a mortgage with people as incompetent as you.
The smokers’ breaks vs. non-smokers’ no breaks is getting worse at work; there’s been another person hired who is a smoker, so the smokers (three of them) are taking frequent breaks and yukking it up together all day, and the other three who aren’t smokers just sit and work all day long. I’m only there part-time as a temp, and I almost always take my breaks, but I’m feeling really badly for the other non-smokers; I don’t know how they can possibly not resent this, especially since one of the smokers is the supervisor, and I don’t see any way they could bring it up to him and expect him to do anything, since he’s participating in the unfair behaviour.
When my assignment is almost over there, I intend to cause trouble and try to convince the non-smokers that they should start taking the breaks that they are allowed under the Alberta Labour Laws. I might just simply ask the guy who has been in the department for years why the smokers get breaks but the non-smokers don’t - what kind of arrangement do they have?
ETA: Forgot a special shout-out to the woman in the department who was playing Christmas music loudly all day already. She can knock that shit off any time now.
I got a dose of that at JoAnnFabrics the tuesday before Thanksgiving and i had a GODDAMN moment where I appreciated your problem; if i had actually bought fabric i migt have had to wash it first. As in “Goddamnit coud you possibly use any more apple scent? Damn that’s a fuckton of apple.”
I understand that you are accustomed to living in your own home, where you have arranged things - including the climate control systems - just the way you like them. Further, I understand that the climate of your adopted hometown in the Southern portion of the United States is considerably different from that of our (that is, my and cwPartner’s) home in the upper Midwest. However, you are not an ignorant man, and you know that November is likely to be colder here than there.
Stop bitching about the cold. Seriously. Shut the fuck up. Don’t ask me if we turned up the heat in the house. We did. We’re not going to crank it up to 80 degrees. Put on a goddam sweater.
Don’t ask if we’ve turned on the heat in the car. We did. You’ll warm up when the car does.
Stop bitching about nonexistent drafts in the bedroom.
Do us all a favor and spend Thanksgiving with your relatives in Florida next year. We’re happy to host you for Labor Day.
Time to identify someone a bit higher (say, 2-3 levels) up the food chain and casually let slip that you can never find your supervisors because the smokers in your area are always outside taking long breaks. Or something to that effect. Innocently making that statement to someone else in the ‘accidental’ presence of this higher up is usually a more useful approach, since you don’t appear to have sought them out to complain or intentionally get someone into trouble.
