Thursday, July 01, 2004
Name the Kitty, Avoid the Movie
Chris Metcalf is looking for kitten name ideas. Go help him come up with a clever yet suitable name for the adorable little squirt.
On a completely unrelated note, he also reviews a certain infamous film by a filmmaker we are not allowed to describe as “overweight” because that would be a display of politically incorrect bias.
Cassini
I love the pictures of Saturn’s rings that are coming back so far.
Bitten By COBRA
Now I remember! I also wanted to link and rant about this post from yesterday.
When I left my job at a major outsourced technical support company based in Massachusetts, I learned that the primary job of the COBRA administrator is to try to get you to lose the coverage for the entire time you are supposed to be able to have it.
First, the company screwed up and didn’’t send me notice that I could get COBRA until June. I left there in January. At the same time, they never put in for my having left, somehow, even though the manager did the paperwork and filed it, so I remained covered as if I still worked there after I left. They also never paid me my residual little bit of vacation time, or the retroactive pay I could have expected from a raise following my review that was due in November, but was done immediately before I left. Might have been as much as $500.
Anyway, it took my demanding in a letter that they offer me COBRA as legally required to get them even to offer it in June, when they finally figured out I was gone and cancelled my insurance. I had no trouble paying retroactively for the intervening months. Trouble was, they retroactive uncovered the dental work I had done, unpaid the dentist some $400, and in addition to having no choice about when the COBRA coverage officially started (January) when I finally got it, I also had to pay hundreds for stuff they uncovered in the meantime.
Anyway, first trick was this: In June they sent me the paperwork and tried to charge me only through April, on a plan that was “sudden death” if you didn’t pay by the beginning of the month the premium covered. If they didn’t get it on time, they canceled, no recourse, period. So from the start, they tried setting me up. No way. I paid all the way through June in that first installment.
From there it was things like failing to send payment forms, not sending notice of premium increase until after the fact, that sort of thing. It was all setup to make me not want to bother to keep it, or to lose it based on stringent and maleable rules.
This is probably what happened to Acidman. Just as well to have good insurance that won’t be trying to play games so they don’t have to deal with you.
For what it’s worth, I’ve spent about as much of my life uninsured as I have insured. What I miss most with my current, cheesy insurance for self-employed people is the dental coverage I used to have at my old job and under COBRA for that 18 months less the couple they retroactively didn’t cover after covering then never gave me back even though I paid for them.
Looking For A Rat’s Ass? None Here!
Sgt. Mom is brilliant in both content and phrasing. I especially love paragraphs four through six. In particular:
The European intellectual set? Considering that they’ve been on their knees for the last 80 years, performing intellectual fellatio on Uncle Joe Stalin and his heirs and ilk, their approval of our works and ways was never a likely thing; nor do they relish the reminder of the human costs of Marxism’s various brave new worlds—especially since so many of the fortunate survivors of the various national experiments finished up here. And the manner by which millions of Europeans-- Jew, Romany, gays, retarded, religious and political dissidents--- were loaded into the gas chambers by their peers and neighbors is a living memory to many Americans; the survivors of that adventure in totalitarianism must relish the pious lectures on toleration and racism received from the same direction as their initial persecution.
Via the always excellent Caerdroia here
Our President, or Just Theirs?
Ith has posted an excellent, concerned musing. In part:
I never hated Al Gore, I didn’t vote for him, but not because I hated him. However, Gore equates disagreement to being a “Digital Brown Shirt”, a Nazi. And John Kerry hasn’t even made a token attempt to distance himself from such smears, or similar pronouncements from other supposed “mainstream” Democrats. Should I perceive that as tactic agreement?
Fast Food Droids
I was busy yesterday when I saw a couple of Acidman’s posts that inspired me to want to write about the topics, in answer or in commiseration. One is a post in which he asks: What the hell has happened to fast food restaurants?
Meaning, why is it robotic employees preparing food in assembly line fashion, rather than people who know how to cook doing more traditional food preparation.
Well, the whole point of the fast food industry is to treat food preparation as a factory or assembly line process for the sake of efficiency and predictable uniformity. They are selling that uniformity. They are selling speed. They are pricing and generating a certain margin and sales volume combination based on the factory model of food production. It also means being able to keep wages at the low end and be an entry level job that just about anyone can do. Actually, more so, the more efficient they can make things and the more robotics they can bring into it. They also make things efficient and predictable with as much control and uniformity as they can give to production of product from the farms on up.
So yeah, the employees look like robots. That’s just how it is. If you call a diner type of restaurant with a traditional short order cook “fast food” too, well, that’s a distinct segment. What I generally call fast food is the factory food part of things, the places the less sane members of the population rail at for making us mindlessly fat through no fault of our own.
As for the change making part of things, that drives me nuts.
When I worked for a convenience store chain in the eighties, I learned how to make change and it was pretty much a no brainer. I found sometimes it was like pulling teeth to teach new hires to do the same. The people who would work for what they paid weren’t necessarily the most blessed with brain development. Or at least tended to be afflicted with Public Education Syndrome.
Before long, all the stores started getting registers where you entered amount tendered and it told you what to give for change. Confused the shit out of me, as I would sometimes forget that was the amount due back, and would start making change manually as if the change back displayed on the register was the total sale. Doh!
Then we could lower the hiring standards and get people who had trouble pulling the correct combination of monetary denominations out of the drawer to add up to the change back on the display. Argh! Never mind giving them the extra coinage after they had already punched in the amount tendered.
They are just those kinds of jobs in an economy productive enough to throw most of the more intelligent, experienced folks into something better after they’ve had time to recover from their educations. You take the lowest denominator and barest entry level folks, throw them at a fast food factory or convenience store and a register, and of course they’re unlikely to care about what they’re doing or be skilled at handling the unexpected bit of mental juggling. Not after our “educators” have been indoctrinating and “teaching” them with an eye to dulling any native thinking ability that might have been blooming there.
Good Question
Ian asks: Do you remember your thoughts on 12 September 2001?