(Is this where I mention that Donald Fagen was my uncle's college roommate and I've had lunch with him? Name-dropping, it's what's for breakfast!)

Ok this? Extremely cool.

VW - (and this is not meant in any way to reflect on other people who answer phones and help people deal with their stuff - just this one heartless and rude individual who obviously should be in a different industry) - when you speak with the supervisor, give them as much information about the call, complete with what was said, and by whom. Tell them you are following up with a written version.

As a person who answers phones and, ostensibly, helps people deal with their stuff, I just want to say...YES, THIS!

The person you dealt with, bug, was one of those asshats that makes my job indescribably harder. Plus, Sox's advice re: preparedness and demeanor is spot on. We WANT people like you with legitimate grievances and coherent and complete information to call.

Give this fucking fuckhead fucker the what for via the supervisor. Get them out of my sandbox.

but also you should get some sort of assurance that this won't happen to anyone coming to Mass Gen trying to sort out their billing ever again.

Just to clarify, this wasn't the hospital, it's the medicaid office, which is MassHealth in MA.

And I just got off the phone with the YMCA (FINALLY got that fixed, and they're issuing me a huge reimbursement! YAY!), so now I will call MassHealth back.

I have come to the conclusion that I am a horrible Indian. Every other Indian person I check on Facebook has gobs and gobs of Indian friends.

Well, your family has done a great job of overloading any possible warm fuzzy "OMG shared heritage YAY" feelings you might ordinarily have with a metric assload of conflict and stress and Not Good Enough/You Disappoint Us-ocity.

BTW, that was a completely charming letter you sent lpfw. I'm vibing good things to you.

Thanks to all the beer talk, I am now craving a nice deep dark stout. At just past nine in the morning.

And, lastly, am I a horrible skipping-past-everything bad skipper and I missed where someone else linked to this excellent babycentric YouTube video, or is it just so ancient that everyone's already seen it and wearied of it months ago?

Post-lastly, it appears that I can haz job. I don't know exactly when it starts or what the salary will be, but it is MINE. Admin work for adult cardiology back at UC, starting, uh, sometime next week. I'm breathing again for the first time in weeks.

eta: yay vw for winning the YMCA battle! I'm vibing stern, eloquent smiting vibes to you for the next round of calls to Mass Health. Speak to that woman's supervisor and then smite her. Smite her a lot.

On hold for a supervisor...

JZ - congratulations!!!

JZ! YAY! That's wonderful!

In other "I feel smart" news, I got a Palm Tungsten E2 off of eBay and received it yesterday. The installation software was throwing up errors. Hubby started going, "It's a dud, send a complaint."

But, in best tech support tradition, I noted the error message and searched Palm's support library, then discovered I had to uninstall my old Palm software first. After that, the software installed but it wouldn't sync, so I popped over to Device Manager to check for errors, then let it copy over more drivers.

I feel so smart.

JZ, you rock!

"Charlie that huuuuuuuuuuuurts!"

JZ, I'd meant to link to that weeks ago when I first heard of it, and I kept forgetting, so thank you!

Everyone else, click. Right now. And turn your speakers on. Don't worry about co-workers overhearing - they'll thank you for brightening their day.

Also click on this one, which was my second guess as to what was behind JZ's link. (No sound necessary for this one, but it does have non-sexual boobies in it.)