Rant #2,816: Human Touch

I welcome myself back to my usual weekday perch at the helm of this nearly 13-year-old blog.

Yesterday became a very trying day out of nowhere for myself and my family.

The easiest thing, to be honest about it, was going to the doctor for a 7 a.m. appointment.

Nothing with nothing, got it done, and that was the end of that …

Or so it appeared.
 
We received the mail by late morning, and in it was a letter from the insurance company where my son gets his eye care—you might remember that I had some tremendous problems getting him his Medicate Part B, and then getting him the add-ons to his coverage for dental and eye care—and after reading over the material, I found that some of the financial material was incorrect.
 
Not only that, but he had not received his welcome package and had not received his membership card—but he did get this letter that unnerved me.
 
So I called the insurance company, and that single call led to a three-hour odyssey where not only wasn’t I getting the financial  information I needed, but I could not even speak to anyone about getting him his lousy membership card.
 
I spoke to people who were completely incompetent, and in the midst of this incompetency, I was disconnected two or three times.
 
But I do not take “no” for an answer when it comes to such matters, and since I am retired and have absolutely nothing to do with my time—nothing could be further from the truth—I kept at it until I got all the answers to my questions and I received an assurance that his material was in the mail—which I will believe when I see it.
 
And by the way, my son is paid in full on this account for the year, so why I had to go through all this and have to push the company to do what they already should have done is beyond me.
 
So with three hours under my belt, I decided that since I had also not received a blessed thing from his dental care insurance provider, that I would call them and try to get them to start moving on this too.
 
That began an additional two-hour odyssey where at one point, I didn’t even know if my son had dental care with this company … and then later found out that for some reason, he has three membership numbers with the company.
 
Well, the roller coaster ride continued, but finally, all of it was cleared up and my son actually received a physical membership card—albeit a paper one—from the dental company.
 
Now, in between all of this, while on hold and while being bandied around by the two companies, I was able to edit two stories and write an original one for my work, which in between alerted me that there is a conference I need to cover today and another next week—so today is in the crapper already, and the day next week might be too.
 
So for a retired person, heck, I don’t feel retired, and if this is what retirement is, I really and truly want to go back to work full time.
 
I have said it time and time again: I don’t like being retired, I feel that at least seven years of my working life were ripped away from me, and this is not what I pictured retirement to be.
 
Maybe I was being naïve thinking all of this, but I have learned that when you are retired, the onus for everything—and in particular, anything having to do with health insurance—squarely falls in your lap.
 
When you are working, these things are generally taken care of for you by your human resources department and/or human resources officer, but when you are retired, you are thrust into the role of personal human resources officer whether you like it or not, or whether you are prepared for it or not.
 
During the past six months or so in particular, I have been in contact with federal and state authorities, local authorities, and several insurance companies trying to get things right for myself and my family, and if you think we are living in a bizarro world because of the pandemic, you haven’t seen anything yet until you deal with the entities that I have dealt with.
 
I am going to tell you this: nothing gets done until each and every one of these entities is pushed to the limit, and that means taking out what I call my “wild card” and telling them that I will get a lawyer and sue them if they do not do the right thing.
 
That usually wakes them up a bit, but why should I have to go to those ends to get things the right way for myself and my family?
 
Heaven knows why, but that is how it is today.
 
Incompetence is paramount, and even accepted (not by me), people have forgotten how to use their brains, and then we have the very Internet that you are reading this blog entry on, which has made things even more complicated than they already are, even though such electronics are supposed to make things easier.
 
When the "human touch" is omitted from that equation--dealing with actual people who know their jobs and business and know what they are talking about and really want to help you--that is where the problem is, and with everything being done electronically nowadays, that human touch is virtually non-existent.
 
And yes, whether we are talking about the calamities that I have been through or even the pandemic, what has been missing is the human touch, which if in place, would make things better.
 
It might not fully eradicate the problems we have, but it would certainly make them a little more palatable and fixable, in my opinion.
 
But it isn’t going to revert back to what it was, so we are just going to have to learn to exist without that human touch …
 
And I will be on the phone the next time something weird happens related to myself or my family.
 
I often feel like Don Quixote battling those windmills, but what else can I do?