Hello Shop Dwellers! It's 68*F and calm under clear skies here at my central MD home.
THANKS for all the "likes", comments, and sympathy frowns in response to my previous two postings:
Phil, Gary, Hughie, GT, Tom-O, Steve, Karl, Patrick, Tom (Cambria), Ray, Garry, Sherrell, Guy, Joe, Chet, Willie
Terry - Wow! I was hoping that Murphy's Monday attack on me would divert him
away from you...but no such luck. The bastard obviously has the gift of
bi-location!
Steve - sorry to hear of your daughters' dreadful eye affliction! Don't worry about sharing stuff like that, that's one of the things we do here in the Coffee Shop thread. As a result of reading your post, I wrote-up a prayer index card
* for your daughters and you. [
* Index cards are the only way I can remember exactly who to pray for, and what to pray about!]
Willie, there will definitely be more photos, as soon as I've made it presentable for the MER 2021 op session - hopefully within the next 2 months. I just have this 'thing' about wanting peoples' first impressions of my layout to be the best possible!
I've been lucky in regard to that, most of my PC doc's staff have gotten to know me over these past 28 years and are always very friendly and helpful. As for the clowns I had to deal with over the phone on Monday, I suspect they aren't even employees of the Johns Hopkins Medicine system, but part of a
contracted answering service. If I go to the eye clinic in person, I just hand them my insurance card and sit in the waiting area - and they hand it back to me 5-10 minutes later, probably after calling the phone number on the card to verify my coverage. These people on the phones, they just have a simple script to follow - and can't handle something slightly out-of-the-ordinary like a number read aloud from a Cigna card issued by a
subsidiary that manages their large group plans.
No need to convince
me about that
Tom! I've been wanting to do this for years, just didn't realize it was this easy. The planned op session for the MER guys is what spurred me to finally confront the task and tackle it!
Chet - I know that
had to be painful putting her in the ground, but now after the final closure, maybe things can gradually get back to normal for you [i.e., possibly
another dachshund to be rescued?].
As for the "idiots", I suspect that they are contractors who get evaluated on how many calls they can conclude per hour (also see my reply to
Willie on that topic above), and having to actually
call an insurance company would slow them down...
* * *
Well, I never quite made it to the eye clinic today: What was normally
supposed to be a six-hour day for me, turned into a 9-hour day because the central IT department was doing a dry-run test of an upgrade of the corporate database - and they needed my reporting software [~70 modules] to be fully recompiled and connected to the new database
before COB so the users could do all their testing on Wednesday. This fact hadn't registered in my brain when they first sent the announcement email 2 weeks ago. [Truth be told, I
didn't really feel like driving to that eye clinic anyway!] Luckily this sort of situation only arises for me every 3- to 4 years, whereas I think
Patrick has to deal with it a lot more frequently.
No new trainroom progress to report...but maybe tomorrow?