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I've been in a three-month struggle with my insurance company (where "with" both means that they are my opponent and that they are battling alongside me) where a database typo has convinced their computer that back in July I had the exact same appointment twice, on the 23rd and 28th (you see immediately how easily a 3 turns into an 8 or vice versa), paid by the same exact check. Since then, other payments have been bouncing (but only from 2014; 2015 is of course a clean slate). Nobody seems to have the authority to remove the obviously wrong double entry. So I check in about every month, they try a new way of deleting it they're sure will work, and then we wait a month to see if that processes correctly. Which it doesn't.
The conversation each month takes about half an hour as I bring somebody up to speed, and I have a little log book with a bunch of dates, names, check numbers, times faxes were sent. Whoever I'm talking to normally makes one or two forays to explain why probably this is all reasonable, because surely that one typo couldn't be blocking these other payments, and I say "no" extremely firmly several times. Then we are all on the same page again and I am apologized to profusely.
Because of who I am, I am also (in my mind but not in my logbook) tracking the amount of time I spend on these calls to figure out my own hourly rate to reclaim this money, although this is obviously work I would do for nothing because it is my patriotic duty in a capitalist society to make sure billing is orderly.
It is probably the most high-adrenaline thing I do each month. I have to drink a lot of coffee afterward to calm down (where "calm down" means create an alternative fiction for why I'm tense). It reminds me of the Tuttle/Buttle mistake in Brazil, but only if in the end Michael Palin turns out to be controlled by HAL.
The conversation each month takes about half an hour as I bring somebody up to speed, and I have a little log book with a bunch of dates, names, check numbers, times faxes were sent. Whoever I'm talking to normally makes one or two forays to explain why probably this is all reasonable, because surely that one typo couldn't be blocking these other payments, and I say "no" extremely firmly several times. Then we are all on the same page again and I am apologized to profusely.
Because of who I am, I am also (in my mind but not in my logbook) tracking the amount of time I spend on these calls to figure out my own hourly rate to reclaim this money, although this is obviously work I would do for nothing because it is my patriotic duty in a capitalist society to make sure billing is orderly.
It is probably the most high-adrenaline thing I do each month. I have to drink a lot of coffee afterward to calm down (where "calm down" means create an alternative fiction for why I'm tense). It reminds me of the Tuttle/Buttle mistake in Brazil, but only if in the end Michael Palin turns out to be controlled by HAL.
