And the headache continues

I hate medical insurance.

I know, I know. "Hate" is a very strong word. It's not often I use that word and truly mean it. But in this case, I feel absolutely justified in my use of it. Medical insurance has caused nothing but trouble in my life. When dealing with cancer several years ago, the insurance carrier who my employer was using refused to pay any of my bills, claiming it was a "pre-existing condition." They stuck me with around $60,000 in medical bills. Needless to say, this has caused some problems in my life. Now today, cancer is once again being... well... cancerous.

After getting all treated and "cured" of all that nasty cancer business, I still have to go in for yearly checkups. I have to get my blood drawn to make sure that my T3, T4 and thyroglobulin levels are good. I have to get an ultrasound on my neck to make sure nothing's regrown. And I have to shake my doctor's hand and say "Thanks for not letting me die!" It's a pretty simple set of procedures, really, but it's costly nonetheless. For that trouble, the doctor's office charges $641. Ouch. Not to fear, medical insurance to the rescue! ...or maybe not. While they were kind enough to get the charges reduced to $221.91 due to "preferred rates" (umm...what?), they didn't actually pay any of it. Not a single penny. Nada. But wait, my work has planned for just such a problem! We have a second bit of coverage titled "Hospital Confinement Indemnity (GAP) Insurance." Yes, that does say "Hospital." No, I did not get this work done at a hospital. Don't worry, I'll come back to that. So now, a few phone calls, emails and hours later, I've got a GAP (is this supposed to be an acronym for something? Because I sure don't see it...) claim form to fill out and send along to this OTHER insurance company. As I am informed by our insurance carrier however, they will not cover the office visit. They will only cover the procedures performed there. So this leaves me with $61.37 (their cute little preferred rate) to pay of an original $641 bill. Not bad; I can handle that. After filling out the form, gathering up my doctor's bill, my original insurance explanation of benefits (in which they explained that they are going to do absolutely jack,) I faxed off all 9(!) pages to the GAP insurance company. Done deal! I should have a check in my hand within 10 days; fantastic!

But wait, you say, what about that "Hospital" business? This is where I get confused. I did not have my procedures performed at a hospital. I have not even been to a hospital in some time (knock on wood) and that is perfectly okay with me. This GAP coverage is specifically worded to be for hospital confinement resulting from sickness or injury. Granted, there is an "outpatient" section under which I may theoretically be covered, but I'm not holding my breath. Our insurance broker is absolutely certain this will be covered. After all, that's exactly why we got this silly second bit of coverage. Why wouldn't it cover it?

I'm just waiting to cringe and bend over at this point.

I hate medical insurance.

No wonder our nation is obese

You know, it really saddens me (and in fact, enrages as well) to read news headlines, every single day, along the lines of "Weight Lifting Benefits Breast Cancer Patients," and "Health Buzz: Diet and Excercise Protect Brain and Other Health News." Those are just two examples taken straight from Google News today. If I go digging onto individual news outlets, I get more wonderful gems. Take, for instance, this one from CNN: "Could Fat Babies Mean Fat Toddlers?"

Seriously, people? Is our nation really that mentally challenged that we still can't figure out what keeps us at the top of the list of fattest countries in the world? Here, let me save everybody a whole lot of time and sum it all up in one quick sentence: Healthy diet, combined with regular exercise, will keep you healthy.

DONE.

If you want to lose weight, start jogging. If you want to gain muscle, lift weights. If those don't sound attractive to you, take up another hobby involving physical activity; dance, hiking, rock climbing, soccer, swimming, ANYTHING. It's not that difficult of a formula here, people. We're not searching for the elusive Higgs Boson. We're not trying to find the last digit of Pi. It's a simple matter of common sense and paying attention to your own body.

There is, of course, one other important message buried in this rant; most especially in that last paragraph. That message, for those of you who didn't notice, is: If you're not happy with the way you are, CHANGE. Don't say "I wish I was healthier;" do something about it!

If you find this posting offensive, first off, thanks for reading far enough to even become offended. That shows that you found some relevancy here. Second, try to think about why exactly it offends you. Hit too close to home? Think hard. Then do something about it.

A whole new level of frustration

This whole low iodine diet thing is going to kill me one of these days. Not only is it a hassle to have to cook all of my meals, with very limited ingredients... but I'm also staying with friends right now, so I don't have all of my normal kitchenware and spices. Then to top things off, since I am staying with friends, my entire life is packed up in boxes in the garage... which, up until 5 minutes ago, included all of my cookbooks and loose recipes. Just about an hour ago, I began the endeavor to hunt for these materials... and I have just now finally gotten to sit back down at my computer, finally having achieved my goal. I had to, quite literally, climb around, over and THROUGH all of my belongings. I opened nearly ever box that I had packed in the hopes that these were in there. Now, I know what you're thinking... cook books, the box should be labeled "Books". That's what I thought. Next logical guess.. "Kitchen". Nope. Then I started going through the unlabeled boxes, of which I had plenty. I packed and moved in a bit of a hurry. By the time I got to the last 2 boxes, I was about ready to give up. One of the boxes is nigh impossible to get to without removing half of my other belongings first. The other box, which was in fact right out in front within easy access, I had discounted right off because it was far too large. Certainly I wouldn't put books in a box that large. ...right? Oh well the hell, so I tried it, and lo and behold, there are my freaking cookbooks.

Damn that sucked.

At least I can say I got a good workout today. Even if it wasn't rock climbing, my thus-far limited experience with it certainly helped, finding foot holds and hand holds through that mess.

...now I have to spend the time actually cooking something. Ugh.

I think I may just go get some of The Joey Pizza.

Life = Insanity

Yes, it has been several months since I've posted on here again. Bad Tarky, bad!

Life has been, if possible, more insane in these few months. This week, however, seems to be somewhat of a culmination of all of this craziness. Just today I've dealt with car insurance, 2 different people about my health insurance, Big Brothers Big Sisters, City of Chandler, the HOA for the house I'm renting, a mortgage consultant and helping an employee with a broken down car. The good news is, my car is getting fixed, my health insurance is finally getting taken care of so that hopefully everything will get paid off, I'm getting rid of all the old clothes which have been bagged up in my garage the past few months, I'm getting rid of all the large trash that's been cluttering up my back yard, the front yard for this house will stop sucking, I may very soon be a home owner and I may get to help replace a clutch... very good experience there!

The big news there, of course, is the house. This bit of good news, however, comes covered with acid. Apparently not all of my friends are happy with me because of this. To be more specific, I have fully lost one of my best friends, and perhaps gained an enemy solely due to the fact that I am buying a house. Now, okay, we had talked about me moving into her place because I have to be out of my current house by April 20 and I didn't have another place to go. So it worked out great for me. Then recently I had some other friends basically drop a house in my lap and say "Here, buy this. Please. We want you to buy this and we will help in any way we can." Great! What an opportunity! This is of course something which I did convey to the friend I was going to be moving in with and we talked about it very briefly but I had made no final decisions at the time. I would note, however, that not once during these conversations did she say "No, you can't do that, I need you to move into my place like we talked about before." To me that basically solidified the fact that offering me a place was basically just a friendly gesture... which I appreciate greatly. As I found out today, after conveying the good news of the house, it was apparently not. What I am hearing now is that she needs me to move in so that she can cover the bills. Great for me to know that NOW.

This puts me in quite a dilemma. Do I drop out of the home buying process now, so that I can help a friend? Do I continue buying the house and just let this friendship drop? I don't want to lose a friend, for sure. She has been a wonderful friend and helped me through a lot. Then again, this whole situation is, for lack of a better term, pretty fucked up. From our brief conversation today I picked up on a few things. The first one was, of course, that she can be quite self centered sometimes. It's very rare that I do something for myself as opposed to doing everything I can for everybody else. This is something that people have been getting on my case about for a long time now, including the very friend now angry at me for doing this. The second piece is, seeing how she knew about the house opportunity and that I was interested in buying it, that means that she ASSUMED I was going to fail in some form or another. In her mind, there was never any possibility that it would actually happen. What kind of friend is going to assume that you will fail in your endeavors?

Either way, I'm out of a backup place to live now, in case the mortgage falls through for whatever reason. Today was just initial application and docs. There are still a million things that could go wrong. Hell, I could even decide to back out still at this point.... I think. Not that I would want to, this is a pretty exciting prospect for me. This is like a defining point in my life, buying my first house... and most importantly doing it on my own.

I think my new motto is going to be: Fuck it all, I need a drink.

I hate customers.

Okay so I like their money... but I hate dealing with customers. Every single one is so self-important and certain that they're the center of the universe, that they can't stop for one moment to realize that you're just trying to do your job and keep things running smoothly, just like they are. I really wish I didn't have to deal with customers; it's not even in my job description. IT people aren't suppose to interact with end users, it's just not how it's done. That's like telling Rainman to teach a math class. It's just not a good idea!

I think this is proof that I should never work in a job of any form where I need to deal with the public.

Selective Racism

If "racist" terms offend you, I would recommend tuning out now.

Alright, now that the warning is out of the way, I can get on with my rant. This is another of my "why I hate people" rants. See, it started out yesterday when I went to see a movie. It was "The Departed", a movie about corrupt cops in Irish Boston. Original, I know. Pretty good movie anyways. So, being set in Irish Boston, dealing with organized crime, they start off right away talking about "guineas". For those of you who may not know, guinea is a derogatory term for an Italian. I laugh the first time I hear the term, and not a single other person in the audience seems to even notice it. Now at this point, I should mention the people sitting in front of me. In the row directly ahead of me is a black woman, and in the row ahead of her are two more black women. Nothing against them, it's just vital to the story. Alright so after a couple minutes of Jack Nicholson talking about guineas, he also uses the word "nigger". And oh boy was there a reaction to that one! The woman directly ahead of me said "I don't like this so much already," or something along those lines. A bit of hooting at the screen, general disgust at the use of the word. The movie goes on, lots more talk of guineas, he had to have used that term at least 20+ times throughout the movie. At one point, he also used the terms "mick" (Irish) and "chink" (Chinese); again, inciting laughter from me and no reaction from the rest of the audience. Then he says "nigger" again. More disgust and hooting from the rows ahead of me. Oh and did I mention the vacuum that was created by every white asshole in the theatre puckering each time that word was mentioned?

So let me get this straight. You can say "guinea", you can say "mick", you can say "chink" and nobody cares. They could have probably even gotten away with dago, wop and goombah without a hint of notice from the crowd. But as soon as you say "nigger", everybody is up in arms. This makes absolutely no sense to me.

Honestly, I don't really understand "racial slurs". They're only offensive if you take offense. I'm Irish, I call myself a mick and laugh about it. I'm white, I call myself cracker, whitebread, honkey and again I laugh about it. One of my best friends in high school was Chinese and Vietnamese. He got called to the principal's office one day because he was walking through the halls, chanting "I chink I can, I chink I can..." When he was in there, the principal told him that he couldn't use racial slurs. His reaction? "How can it be a racial slur? I AM a chink! A slanty-eye! A gook!" And he's right. It's not a slur, because he takes no offense.

Our society has turned into a bunch of coddled pussies. Hasn't anybody ever heard the old saying "Stick and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me." Get over it, people.

The terrorists have won.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/01/31/boston.bombscare/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/02/01/boston.bombscare/index.html

I give up. I used to have some glimmer of hope for humanity. That's all gone. My absolute favorite quote, from this additional article, reads:

"It is unconscionable that in this post-9/11 environment that Turner Broadcasting would do something like this in an urban setting," Boston Police Superintendent Ed Davis said.

Wait wait wait .... "post-9/11" environment?!?!?
Hold on, let me think for a second, do a bit of math here... They're talking about September 11, 2001... today is February 1, 2007... that makes it 5 years, 4 months, 20 days. Nearly 65 months. 1969 days. You get the point. A LONG FUCKING TIME! By the same right, this is a "post-WW2 environment", a "post-Great War environment"... hell a "post-Civil War environment!"

I don't really know where I'm going with this... but this crap makes me both very angry and very sad at the same time. It's just pathetic.

Concert ticket bullshit

I'm rather annoyed right now.

I just went online to buy tickets for a Flogging Molly concert. That, in itself, is totally awesome. I'm Irish. They're Irish. It's on St. Patty's day. All good! Or, well, so it would seem.

So I go to the concert ticket page and proceed to order tickets for myself and my good buddy Don. $29 per ticket. Not too bad, considering it's Flogging Molly on St. Patty's day. Okay, I'm cool with that.

Then I get to the checkout page, and the charges begin to add up. Here is a breakdown of the costs, PER TICKET.
Ticket price: $29.00
Building Facility Charge: $3.00
Convenience Charge: $5.00
(What the HELL is so "convenient" about that?)
That adds up to $37.00 per ticket. A bit more ouch.

Then on top of all THAT, I have to pay an additional $2.50 to have the tickets delivered via "TicketFast". What is TicketFast, you might ask? Well, let me explain. It emails the tickets to you. So that you can print them out. It's an AUTOMATED SYSTEM to email the tickets to you. It costs them nothing to do. And yet, it costs $2.50.

Hahaha, and get this. As if all of that weren't enough, I get to the final page where I put in my credit card info, and there's a $3.35 "Order Processing Charge".

This all adds up to a grand total of $79.85, for 2 tickets to a concert. Tickets which started out at $29.00 each. That's $58.00 total. What the hell is this crap about?

The final crowning achievement of this horrible website is that they have time limits on each page. You find the tickets you want, you have 2 minutes to claim them. Creating an account on the site so that you can buy the tickets, you've got 1 minutes. Putting in all of your credit card information, you've got 3 minutes. What about people who type slow? What if you have to get up and take a piss? What if you get distracted in the middle of the order process? You have to start all over. From the beginning. That's what I call a piss poor user experience.

I definitely won't be using TicketMaster again.