Spring Is Sprung

So, where have you been? asks you.

*sigh*

Not enjoying myself, that’s for certain. It’s been a rather nasty three weeks, requiring us to focus our energies on trifling things like trying to obtain ‘customer service’ from our lousy land-line telephone provider. Did you know that almost every one of the AT&T “customer service reps” we spoke to at AT&T’s service center during one marathon five-hour period was named “Danny,” even though none of them could even pronounce the name Danny? Odd, that…

*ahem*

The problem we have remains unresolved because I, of course, need to provide AT&T with my seven-digit customer ID number in order to obtain service, an ID number which, according to multiple “Dannies,” is clearly printed on every bill. Unfortunately, this number does not appear anywhere on an AT&T online customer’s account, and as online customers don’t get printed bills it creates a bit of a problem discovering just what this ID number is. And why didn’t we just ask for our 7-digit ID? Well, one must first provide the seven-digit customer ID number for the account one is asking about before one can get the customer ID for that account released.

Hello?

If I had my customer ID, why would I be calling to get it?

This, Oh Best Beloved, is why the phrase “customer service” has become an oxymoron.

I’d love to switch, but living in a village with only two approved telephone carriers makes that impossible, as services like DSL — even from third-party companies in our area — require us to have (surprise, surprise), AT&T as our local provider.

Deregulation of the phone company has so NOT worked.

Let’s see, what else has gone on?

We’ve been arguing with our 900-pound gorilla of a health insurer, who seems determinedly committed to spending my premiums on finding ways to avoid paying for covered services instead of paying for those covered services. This is an ongoing battle that leaves me exhausted. I’d think we were alone in this, if I didn’t know that this particular company has received enormous fines in another state from that state’s Insurance Commissioner for the exact practices that they are apparently following in ours.

I’m starting to feel as if health and disability insurers as a class (not all – but many) are the robber barons of the 21st century. And before anyone chides me about how I just don’t understand: don’t even start. I indeed do understand and what I’ve witnessed as standard operating procedures within an industry where both I and Michael worked leaves me appalled.

Then… Michael has had to tackle upgrading my little laptop’s operating system. Sounds easy, no?

No.

Because of my physical limitations, I use a specialized laptop which has all sorts of proprietary drivers in its innards which do not happily and easily upgrade. All those drivers are custom, all must come from the manufacturer, and none of them seem to interface easily with Microsoft’s standard systems. On top of that, we’ve been fighting with parts of the new operating system itself, which must get reconfigured one at a time to what we need. To say that it has been a royal pain in the rump would be an understatement at best. It’s not as if Michael is a weekend geek who doesn’t know what he’s about, I might add. This is a guy that is fluent in multiple machine languages, and at the tender age of 23 designed the computer chip used in one of the first external pacemakers approved for use in emergency rooms.

Yep, I’m talking about that kind of geek.

Go, Michael, go!

Whilst all this (and much more) has kept us occupied, Spring has crept in, gently nudging winter from the land. The first crocus blooms opened, and were thoroughly enjoyed by Stewart less than six hours after I photographed them. Most of the snow has melted, and here and there bits of greenery have appeared. Daffodils are within days of blooming, and two pairs of cardinals are vying for ownership of the bird feeders.

I can’t wait for the new baby bunnies to arrive!

Welcome to 2008!

So, Oh Best Beloved, how goes your New Year?

Ours has been… well, odd, so far at least. Which is why there has been a dearth of posting.

On January 2nd a booklet arrived at our abode from the U.S. Census Bureau, which turned out to be the 2007 USDA annual Census of Agriculture. A cover letter instructed us that we should fill it out immediately and provide, under severest penalties of federal law (with punishment presumably delivered by three large club-carrying underpaid and crabby demographers), a complete enumeration of all our pigs, cows, horses, mules, sheep, goats, chickens, turkeys, ducks, llamas, emu and all other assortied beasties. We then were to list every crop we had grown (or tried to grow) in the last year, down to the last mustard seed.

Um… We don’t own a farm.

Nowhere in this nice thick official document did a place exist to politely say, “We do not and never have owned one whit of agricultural land, nor do we own, produce or harbor any livestock. You’ve made a mistake.”

I’ve dutifully sent the form back, properly (and politely) pointing out the error in the nice large white space the Census Bureau provided for comments and address corrections. We’ll see how this evolves. I am not optimistic that the error which classified our little residential lot and dwelling as a farm will be easily remedied, given the bureaucracy that spawned the error in the first place.

*sigh*

That was on the 2nd.

Next we had storms. Major storms. Snow storms, you say? Nope. We had thunderstorms – a rather startling event for early January in northeast Wisconsin.

I was not the least bit thrilled by the deluge of hail that accompanied two hours of lightning and torrential rain. Yes, that is hail on the driveway – not snow – which pounded down on our cars, to my utter dismay. Fortunately, nothing was damaged.

Two F3 tornadoes formed from this system, well south of us. This is only the second time since the 1840s that tornadoes have occurred in Wisconsin in January, making this a very rare event indeed. My heart goes out to the many families who lost their homes in a little town called Wheatland.

Since then we’ve had a plethora of equally odd instances, most related to annoying time-consuming errors made by service providers (which have left me wondering how companies stay in business nowadays).

A rather determined invasion of my living space by a smallish white-tan spider has, however, given me a daily chuckle. She pops up at the most unexpected moments and shouts “Boo!” (if you’ve ever been startled by a spider you know what I’m talking about). She’s also caused me to screech with surprise several times when I have accidentally picked her up, thinking she was a little ball of white fuzz. For those of you who haven’t ever experienced a troublesome and fearless spider playing games, here’s a cleaning hint: fuzzballs should not feel rubbery or wiggle when you pick them up.

Here she is, laying claim to my yogurt container – at breakfast, mind you, when I am at my bleariest and most easily startled by eight-legged intruders.

I expect I’ll find her next doing the backstroke in my glass wine.

I’ll keep you posted.

Pass the Ketchup, Please

“Be careful when you meddle in the affairs of Dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.” – The Drogon Queen

I had a little phone conversation last Friday with a bully from [company name carefully withheld] who felt certain, having never met me, that he could run roughshod over lil’ ol me and ’splain to the little woman how the world really works.

Indeed.

Michael, who was in the room, gave a running stream of advice to said bully while listening to my end of the conversation.

Michael: “Uh, buddy, you don’t want to do that. Really. You don’t. Nope – nope – don’t say that, don’t go there, oh, you don’t want to… no, really, you’re making a huge mistake, my wife doesn’t put up with bullying… no, stop, I’m warning you, I can’t believe you’re not listening, STOP, OH – oops. Too late. She just had you for breakfast.”

Me: *burp*

Didn’t even give me heartburn, that one.

And I Will Sent Hornets Before Thee

I have a quirk — a troublesome habit, one might say — that frequently drives me to question the methodology used to derive results that appear in various reports.

Especially when such results are outlandish, given the rest of the data.

This quirk doesn’t always make everyone else happy.

Today, at the request of a friend, I reviewed a set of blood tests that showed that blood drawn from him has “zero” parts of a particular constituent that makes up human blood.

Say what?

Indeed, Oh Best Beloved, that’s what that printout said.

Now, it is possible, just possible, that the test results are accurate.

Highly unlikely – but possible. If, for example, the blood had come from an individual who had been sitting inside the center of a nuclear reactor, why, then, the result documented so nicely on the laboratory’s test findings is exactly what this particular blood test should show.

Since my friend isn’t glowing in the dark, and has perfectly normal results for all the other indicators that would have been blown out of the water by radiation poisoning, it seems a trifle unlikely that massive (or long-term lower dose) radioactive exposure explains this little oddity in his blood work.

So. Shouldn’t one then wonder if perhaps, just perhaps, that blood test might have a teeny tiny little error in it?

Apparently, according to “Debbie” at the laboratory, one should not. One must call “doctor” because “doctor” will explain what the lab results “mean.”

Fine and well. Except that’s not what I had asked Debbie about. I had asked Debbie which specific methodology was used to obtain the results in her lab tests. As an aside, Debbie already knew that an MD hadn’t ordered these tests. These were done at a “direct access testing” laboratory, and ordered directly by the individual who had the blood drawn. This is a perfectly legal process and available to anyone who wishes to pay for it here in the USA.

And… I specifically didn’t want any interpretation of the results, as they aren’t my blood tests. I had no interest in asking questions about someone else’s medical information. Just in case, I’d covered that by having my friend call first to give the lab permission to talk to me specifically about his results, if necessary. Debbie was actually calling me – based on that request to her lab from my friend. I hadn’t called her.

“I’m not asking for an interpretation of the results,” says I. “I’m asking, as I’ve already explained, if this test was run using a machine scan or via human inspection. The results look like you ran it via machine, and the machine hiccuped and gave a false zero.”

“You have to ask “doctor” what the lab results mean.”

“I don’t know anyone named “doctor,” says I, with a tad of annoyance. “And, let me repeat once again, I am not asking what the lab tests mean. I am specifically asking what methodology your lab used to run this blood work for this specific count because, quite frankly, the results looks like lab error. And if it isn’t lab error, then we’ve got some extremely odd results that may indicate an individual with a serious health problem. So if you can’t answer my question, please find someone who can and get them on the line.”

“You’ll have to ask ‘doctor.’”

“‘Doctor’ won’t have an answer, Debbie, because the question is, ‘what methodology did your lab use to obtain these results? Mechanical or manual diff?’ It’s not reported on the form, so any MD that looks at this information won’t have that answer.”

“You’ll have to ask ‘doctor.’”

Have I ever mentioned, Oh Best Beloved, that my paper on the statistical problems and errors inherent in laboratory tests has been and is used to teach students at universities, and medical personnel, about the limits of such diagnostic tests? Have I ever mentioned that the information about which methodology is used in a test can make a critical difference in interpreting the accuracy of the results? Have I mentioned that this information isn’t the least bit secret and laboratories know this and provide information as to testing methodology quite freely to anyone who asks for it, just for this reason?

And have I mentioned, Oh Best Beloved, that I find stonewalling a trifle annoying? Annoying in a way akin to the annoyance that hornets feel when a stick is poked into their nest?

I believe, I truly do, that Debbie now understands that.

Just call me “hornet.”

The blood work results were indeed obtained by the machine based methodology, and are therefore likely in error.

I would be remiss if I didn’t express my deepest thanks to Debbie’s replacement, “Crystal,” who not only knew the answer to the question I had asked, but also was pleasant and professional to boot.

A piece of unsolicited advice for all the “Debbies” out there: be careful where you poke your stick.

You might just encounter a hornet.

It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World!

Oh Best Beloved, I have a tale of “Customer Service” gone astray that has left me, three days later, still feeling a trifle distraught that I could be such a bad customer…

“What happened?” you ask.

Ah, it was indeed a trial. How burdensome, how difficult it must be for a mega-telecommunications conglomerate to have such a woefully inadequate customer as I.

I wish I had a recording of my call to AT&T to share with you, so you could hear it yourself, and weep for my inadequacies.

Did you know that it is my fault, according to customer service representative “Vic” – I think that was his name – I gave up after 5 times of asking him to repeat his name and twice asking him to spell it, marveling all the while that three little letters could become so badly garbled and wondering precisely where our “Vic” had learned his version of what I think was English and…

Oh. Sorry. Wandered off the topic there.

Anyways, did you know that it is my fault according to “Vic” and his supervisor, “Spencer,” that I don’t know my 4-digit customer ID for AT&T?

This is the 4-digit customer ID that is supposedly printed right next to my phone number on my bills.

It isn’t.

In fact, it does not appear anywhere on my AT&T on-line bills, and never has.

Truly.

It turns out that I am such a bad customer, so naughty, so troublesome for not having this information that AT&T has not given to me, that I was finally told, after many many minutes were wasted of my life, that I’d have to call back when I had My ID in hand, even after I explained repeatedly that I couldn’t have said ID in hand as their online bill doesn’t have and has never had that information.

Well, Oh Best Beloved, what do you think happened then?

Vic told me I should look at my paper bill and give them the ID number that was clearly printed there, right on every paper bill.

Oh? And where was I supposed to get this paper bill? The point of on-line billing is to eliminate paper bills and I’d told Vic and Spencer repeatedly and repeatedly (and repeatedly) that I didn’t get paper bills as I was an on-line customer!

I never got my request to buy a new service handled through “Vic” and “Spencer” because:

(You’ll never guess why, Oh Best Beloved!)

I didn’t have my 4-digit customer ID.

Is this a great way to do business, or what?

AT&T has complained to our public service commission that their land-lines ‘can’t compete’ with the alternatives that are now available to their customers, and that their customer base is rapidly falling off.

What a surprise.

I can tell them why.

Have I told you, Oh Best Beloved, about my new cellphone?