I am finally taking the holiday cards down from around the kitchen doorway. I wait until I am GOOD AND READY. I do not rush it. If they are up until the next year’s cards begin arriving, SO BE IT.
LAST year I bought some reusable cloth gift-wrap bags, so THIS year I am cutting up some of the cards to make gift-tags for NEXT year. I have taken a break from this activity because it is feeling a little futile, in light of who I am as a person. I have cut up old Christmas cards to make gift-tags before; I even bought large specialty craft punches to make a nice decorative edge. Have I ever used a single one of those tags? No. Do I know where those punches are now, or the tags? No.
I am having trouble focusing on this task in part because I woke up at 2:45 a.m., and lay awake feeling fizzy and sick and having imaginary conversations with library management, and did not doze off again until after 5:30, and then woke up for the day at just before 7:00. There was a little feature on NPR the other day about how people who are sleep-deprived don’t realize they are acting irrationally; their behavior and feelings seem normal to them. Many people who claim they can get by on six hours a night, or four, are like people who are not getting unbiased external feedback on the efficacy of their natural deodorant.
I probably should have taken that into account when choosing to deal with an ongoing insurance issue. But, the thing is, I think it is the sleep deprivation that made me spring on it. I had HAD IT. I send blessings to the customer service representative who had to deal with me and my breaking, shaking voice and fragile disposition. I did stay civil, remembering always that she was a person and a representative of her company: she was not the company itself, nor its management, nor was she the previous representatives I have dealt with who evidently did not do what they said they would do, nor was she any of the many, many previous representatives I have dealt with over many, many years of dealing with insurance issues; and at the end of the call I thanked her for her help and also for her patience.
But for the love of god. I have had to make four separate lengthy phone calls, three to the provider and one to my insurance; and my insurance has also contacted the provider directly telling them I am not responsible for this bill, and I am still getting bills threatening me with collections. “CAN YOU SEE HOW MADDENING THIS IS??,” I asked the provider’s customer service representative at one point in the call. “…Yes,” she said. That calmed me more than anything else could have done—well, other than, for example, fixing the problem, which at this point feels like a fantasy. “IT IS STARTING TO FEEL AS IF BILLING IS NO LONGER CHECKING THEIR MESSAGES,” I said to her at another point, after she had explained that I could not contact Billing myself, but could only wait for her (as with the representatives before her) to “send this to Billing for review,” AGAIN. I want to remind you that this is for a bill my insurance company says I SHOULD NOT pay; and my insurance company has personally contacted the provider to “remind them of their contractual obligations not to harass the patient,” and a representative of the provider assured the insurance company that the balance would be wiped. And yet I am still getting threatening bills claiming I have not responded (NOT RESPONDED!!!!) to their requests for payment.
Meanwhile, the hospital where Edward goes for GI has utterly borked their own billing, so that we regularly get demands that we pay our delinquent account of $0 owed for a June 2019 visit. “THIS ACCOUNT IS PAST DUE,” with a big red block of ink around the text. You do not want to know how many times I have attempted to address this. “Wow!,” each representative says in turn, “That’s crazy! We’ll get that fixed for you!” The next month: another red, threatening letter. My hope is that whenever it goes to Collections, which it must have done NUMEROUS times by now over the years, Collections says “????” and puts it directly into the recycling. I hope they add an “Excuse me, WHAT?,” and maybe a big eye-roll, and maybe they show it to a coworker so they can roll their eyes together. Maybe they put it on a breakroom whiteboard for everyone to laugh at.
And then we got a delivery of oil; we have an oil furnace; it was here when we bought the house. In the last three weeks, we have used SO MANY HUNDRED DOLLARS’ WORTH of oil. This is not sustainable. We keep the thermostat at 65-66 degrees when we are home, and I am always cold; I wear a sweater over a shirt; I wear two pairs of socks and one of the pairs is wool; I have electric heating pads for my chairs; we have a down blanket on the bed in addition to another blanket and a quilt and flannel sheets. We have modern windows. I know there are places that will come out and do an evaluation to tell you where you are losing heat; we did this at our old house; probably we should do this at this house. I can barely make myself do things I WOULD enjoy doing, so it doesn’t seem likely that I will do that, but we should. At one point we had a geothermal guy come out, because we’d rather not be on oil heat; he persistently tried to talk Paul out of it, tried to sell him a gas hook-up. Gas is not better. We think it must have been a scam.
I had a brief conference with Paul and William while we were making our dinners. We are going to try using electric blankets and turning the heat much lower at night. When I stay over at my brother and sister-in-law’s house, they turn the heat way down at night and have wool blankets on the beds, and I sleep SO WELL. Getting up to pee is hell’s own torment, of course, but getting back into bed is delightful. We should have done this years ago, but we have had more than the typical number of bed-wetters, and also we have barfy cats, and so laundry has been a consideration. I think even if we have to throw away the occasional electric blanket, that will still be better overall.
We switched from oil to a cold air source heat pump (different from geothermal), and I love it! Our electricity bill does go up a bunch in the winter, but I am warm. I was never warm with oil.
Heat pumps! They are quite cheap to run and you can selectively heat rooms so your bedroom for example can be very toasty while the rest of your house is 54 F at night or cooler.
Read this at 4:45 am because I woke up havig imaginary coversations. The insurance issue is bonkers, and also infuriating. If you lived in Germany, an air source heat pump would be my recommendation, maybe it is feasible where you are, too?
I loved my electric blanket, but I loved the electric mattress pad even more. It was a little stiffer than the best mattress covers, but I liked that trade-off better than having to add the electric blanket to my usual sheet + comforter.
My husband used to preheat the bed for us every night. It had two separate controls, so we could have different settings and turn it off at different times. It was by Sunbeam, I think, and it’s in the closet now and probably still works, but we redid the heating and don’t need it anymore.
The husband who always remembered to preheat the bed was key, though. It only works if you have someone
… who remembers to turn it on in advance every night.
(Sorry, dunno how I messed that up.)
I have both those things (the heated mattress pad and the husband who turns the thing on) and I love both of them intensely. I don’t know why I find the mattress pad so much better than an electric blanket, but I do.
(It has occasionally occurred to me that a timer (like one uses on lights) would also work (i.e. hubby would not have to remember) but we’ve not actually set that up.)
Last week, two people on my neighborhood facebook page were in shock about how much their gas bill had gone up, here in the midwest. Also, a friend of mine who lives in NYC told me that HIS heating bill had gone up by like seven times as much, and his neighbor in the building said the same. Is it just one more terrible thing? Now our options are going to be have heat and be warm but have to live in the poor house OR turn your heat off entirely and be miserable but have enough money to stay in your house? Everything is terrible. :(
I had two local companies out to do quotes for ground source heat pumps about 5 years ago. The quotes were for $75,000 -$100,000 and then after installing and paying I would have been able to get $50,000 back in government rebates. Ion my area the base substrate is granite, so it’s expensive drilling. But the whole pony up the money and then you SHOULD be able to get rebates? I opted not to do this, it would have taken more years than I would be alive to reap any cost savings for this and the uncertainty of the rebates freaked me out. We did get solar panels later and that’s been great. But I bet even if you get an actual geothermal company out you will not want to do it. Also the rebates are likely gonzo with the current political disaster.
“Many people who claim they can get by on six hours a night, or four, are like people who are not getting unbiased external feedback on the efficacy of their natural deodorant.” – I have known both of these types of people.
It’s been an unusually cold winter here and I suspect also where you are. Beth was looking at our heating bill yesterday and wishing we’d switched away from oil twenty years ago, for all kinds of reasons.
We have gas heat (radiators) and a few portable, electric oil radiator heaters we deploy when it’s really cold, like this winter, to drive away the chill in the colder parts of our century house. We keep our house set to 67. I’ve been tracking our gas use for 3 years, and our usage is steady, BUT our bills have nearly doubled. It’s not the gas cost, it’s the “delivery fees”, which now account for almost half our bill. And it’s all because the (GOP-controlled) Public Utilities Commission in our state allowed the provider to increase its fees by 50% (mind you, the CEO of that utility provider makes $33,000 a day, but they claimed they needed more revenue because the $800 million they made in 2024 wasn’t enough). I hate it here.
I’ve seen a couple of experts in the utilities field say that is the reason that bills are so high — it’s the delivery/distribution fee. Not the actual gas/oil price or the usage. Same for electricity.
We use natural gas and my company has what they call the Reservation Charge. It reserves space in other pipelines connected to their system. It’s supposed to help ensure natural gas is always available for residences, even when demand is high. And, of course, the gas company is swapping out old pipes and the customers get to pay an extra fee so the company can recoup those costs, too.
No one is living in my Mom’s house right now. We are working on getting it cleared out to sell it. So I keep the furnace set at 60degrees. I didn’t want to go any lower because I don’t want the pipes to freeze. It’s a very old farm house. It’s been really cold this winter. My Mom’s furnace is diesel, of all things. She always called it fuel oil. Anyway, the January bill made me gasp. And this is a tanker truck hauling it out to my Mom’s house. She’s not using any other infrastructure to get her gas to her house. I need to look closer at the bill and see if the gas company has increased their delivery fee. Or if it’s just that diesel is that expensive.
Thanks for letting me rant a bit.
We have gas and the largest part of our bill (greater than half the bill) is for the DELIVERY of said gas. Such a scam!
I use fleece-lined sweatpants, a heated vest, and a small pocket heating unit.
When I read “I can barely make myself do things I WOULD enjoy doing, so it doesn’t seem likely that I will do that,” I felt it resonate! Wow, yeah. Unfortunately I don’t have any answers for that, but I’m with you.
OMG the insurance/billing/provider cycle is maddening. I once got a bill for a stupid amount from our dentist, something less than $10. After an appointment, it’s always a tossup whether I’ll have to pay $~75 or they’ll say I have a credit for ~$75 so I don’t have to pay. So when I got this bill I was already annoyed with them, and I didn’t want to mail in my cc information, or pay it over the phone, so I mailed a check to their corporate office, knowing it would cost them more than $10 to process. Petty but satisfying.
I spent 7 months fighting a $75 charge from a doc office. I paid upon arrival, and as it was processing it glitched (on their side). I could see the charge pending in my banking app, so they waved me away and said it would all work out. Except it didn’t. They claimed I didn’t pay. I spent MONTHS providing them various proofs of payment, working directly with my bank to provide detailed accounting that would benefit the medical office. Calls, emails, messages in the app, more calls, more departments, more emails. They froze the account so it wouldn’t report as delinquent, but would randomly drop that freeze, add a late fee and I’d start all over. Could I have just paid it again? Yes. Was I going to die on this $75 hill? YES. I finally found an actual name of a customer care person (think: digging deep in Reddit) and emailed them directly and it finally started to gain traction. I was calling every 2 weeks to check in. During one call the guy said “I’m glad you called. I can’t escalate further until the customer calls me back to check the status.” WAIT WHAT???????? At almost the 8 month mark, I got a vm that the situation has been remedied. I keep randomly checking my account to make sure that’s the case. So far so good. But it cost me WAY more than $75 of my time.
I love your writing… “I send blessings to the customer service representative who had to deal with me and my breaking, shaking voice and fragile disposition” So relatable!
For whatever it’s worth (possibly not much) I have occasionally written detailed letters to insurance and/or hospital billing departments, providing dates, conversations, names, amounts, and such (as much as I can, which is often a good bit once I’m 2- or 3-attempts into “getting this resolved!” ***and*** — I think this is key — cc’ed our state attorney general and/or insurance commissioner (and really done so), ***and*** sent all letters (including the cc’ed letters) as hard copies with a signature required upon delivery.
Yes, it is a hassle and costs money, but in the cases where I’ve done this, problems that … were not getting resolved … got resolved.
Good luck to you. It’s crazy-making.
OMG – the insurance madness! Good for you for keeping calm and pestering on.
Recently, my spouse and I did replace our furnace/AC system and went with an electric heat pump. It’s pretty efficient, but even still the cold snap this winter did make the bill go waaay up. The heating/cooling company they told me that changing the temperature throughout the day uses more energy than keeping it at a steady temp, just an fyi. Maybe that applies to your place too. As part of the replacement, we got an some boosters installed that move the heat around the house better. That might be an option if you decide to replace your system.
This cracked me up, Swistle: “I have taken a break from this activity because it is feeling a little futile, in light of who I am as a person.” I feel that in my bones. This year I did not save any cards for future use because I have a huge stockpile of cards that I have not yet used, and may never use.
The insurance thing. My god. WHY. Why is it so impossible to find a person who can address these errors???? We had a horrible experience with a local bank that got access to some of our assets as collateral for a loan, and even though the loan has been repaid for many years, and the assets have been transferred back to us, the bank for some reason STILL gets a copy of our account statement, and NO ONE CAN FIX IT and it drives me mad. I have sent certified letters and had conference calls with the banks and nothing works. It is so stupid. Everything is so stupid.
Sometimes I sleep in an enormous fleece, as in a “jacket-for-outdoors” fleece. I wear it over my pajamas and sleep through the night in it. I have never worn it outdoors. It is my sleeping fleece, and I have grown weirdly attached to it.
That insurance situation sounds frightful.
The fact you said you “lay awake feeling fizzy and sick and having imaginary conversations with library management” gave me the false expectation that there was then a real conversation with library management and I was all primed to find out what it was and then… unsatisfied. But that’s okay! Because the rest was still interesting AND there’s a topic which I can get behind!
I grew up in an old, poorly-insulated farmhouse where there technically was an oil furnace but my parents chiefly heated with a woodstove in the kitchen. Heat would have had to make it from there through a doorway into the 2-story sleeping half of the house and up the stairs and around the corner, and it just didn’t have a good path to travel, so I slept in a cold room. Like, COLD. We had electric heating pads on our mattresses but that didn’t stop the upper half of me from getting chilled, even under a down duvet, so I slept with frequent turns like a rotisserie chicken (to this day I don’t think of mattress pads as being as useful as an electric blanket). We’d set out our clothes for the next day within reach so in the morning we could either grab and pull them into our beds and get dressed under the covers, or – more often – grab them and run downstairs to get dressed in front of the stove. I remember Christmas morning fondly not just because of the traditions and gifts, but because it’s the one occasion I distinctly remember my parents turned on the heat for. When we moved into a new house we built down the road someone asked at a road gathering how the new house was my answer was and enthusiastic “Warm!”. Unfortunately, I turned and the asker was the buyer of my old house and her response was “Really? Mine is kind of cold.” so that was kind of embarrassing.
In a similar situation with repeatedly getting billed for the OVERDUE balance of $0.00, and after repeated phone calls that also promised to take care of the problem, I eventually wrote a an actual, old-school check to the medical office for $0.00.and never heard from them again. It was worth the cost of the stamp.
I love this and am filing this idea for later use