Shadows on the wall

Well, it’s been one of those weeks, on the job and off. So I’m just going to leave you with these pix of a shadow cast on my kitchen wall:

Different foliage than what showed up last summer under similar circs. But every once in a while I like to pay attention to things like this.

Unleashed

Thanks, Republican assholes. You’ve released the Kraken.

I hope you choke. Every last one of you.

And Susan Collins—you can do it twice.

Essential

My employer provides a variety of liquid refreshments to staff (in stark contrast to my previous employer, which didn’t even give us coffee or tea). In addition to a Peets multi-coffee beverage machine and two Nespresso espresso jobbers, there are two industrial fridges containing varieties of Red Bull, bottled iced tea, milk (whole and two-percent), both Pepsi and Coke products (including, God save the mark, Fresca) and flavored waters.

The latter includes still and fizzy. What flavors get stocked seems to depend on the whim of the vendor. Recently the sparkling stuff has toggled between Poland Spring bottles and cans of La Croix. Poland Spring has a somewhat narrow spectrum—orange, raspberry-lime, lemon, lime and just plain old. But La Croix is quite exotic—passionfruit, lemon, coconut, peach-pear, tangerine, mango and pamplemousse.

(Why they choose to translate grapefruit into French and not any of the others, I do not know. I don’t make this stuff up, I just report it.)

Well, I’ve tried them all, because why not? Frankly, Poland Spring does a better job of making the flavors taste natural. I love passionfruit, but can’t quite get into the La Croix version. Even their lemon tastes faux, tbh. And I dumped out nearly a whole can of the coconut stuff after a couple of mouthfuls. And I am cuckoo for coconut.

But here’s what really got me—they tout it as “naturally essenced”. (Even spellcheck knows that verbing that noun is an abomination.)

Marketeers, man.

Rewriting history

Back in the dim dark past, February used to have two federal holidays: the 12^th, honoring Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, and the 22^nd, honoring George Washington’s. At some point, the feds rolled the two of them into the third Monday of the month and called it Presidents’ Day.

This year, that was yesterday, and I’m really grateful that we got the day off. I needed it. (I honored the two titans in the traditional way: I went to Costco, to stock up on butter and laundry detergent.)

Well, except apparently in the state that touts itself as the Mother of Presidents. At the end of last month I had occasion to visit the local branch of the Fairfax County (home to Washington, as it happens) Public Library, and noticed that they marked it thusly:

They even cut off Lincoln from Rushmore.

Sore losers.

Gratitude Monday: walking future

I’m thinking I put the fear of something into Kayla at OrthoVirginia. (I wrote about my interactions with her of a couple of weeks ago, and her indifference to whether I got treatment or not.) Because she called me on Friday to tell me that my health insurance has graciously condescended to approve the hyaluronate, and now there are only about 14 hoops to jump through before I can start getting the injections.

At least three of the steps involve me taking actions, which is a far cry from the last time I went through this. Back then, and with a different insurance, the orthopod said I needed the shots, he ordered the gel, and a couple of weeks later I was getting them. Well, times change, I guess.

Sadly, it’s clear that I’m not going to get them started this time round before I go to the RSA Conference. That sucker takes up three halls of Moscone Center, and my attendance involves walking about ten miles a day on concrete floors. Fortunately, at least I was able to swap out hotel reservations, going from a $680/night (plus taxes that would bring it to about $800) “junior suite” at the Grand Hyatt (the only thing available that was remotely within walking distance when I booked in early January), half a mile away from Moscone, to one night in a “view room” at $573 and three in a “standard room” at $473 at the Marriott Marquis, which is next to the conference. This should make my company—which has a remarkably parsimonious travel policy—happy, and I don’t have to explain “junior suite” on my travel expenses.

(I did this by calling the hotel last week to see if there’d been any cancellations. The reservationist there sent me to the conference organizers, and an amazing customer rep named Crystal got me set up. At one point in the convo, I asked what the difference is between a standard and view room. She hesitated, then replied, “Well, I think the view room has a nicer…view.” Well, okay; seems legit. I’ll have to switch rooms after the first night—they didn’t have a standard room available for the Monday; but I’ve saved my company a few hundred and now I can afford to have cheese on my hamburger.)

But even with being next to Moscone, I know for a fact that those conference floors are brutal. I’m doing the exercises prescribed by my physical therapist, and I’m taking the NSAID prescribed by my orthopod. But I suspect they will be insufficient to counter those floors. Over the weekend I had a flareup of the pain—possibly caused by new trainers (I’ll have to check with the therapist), and that resulted in crappy sleep, because once I stop moving, my joints, tendons and muscles just give me hell.

I’m sorry I won’t be starting the shots until after the trip, but at least I’ll be getting them. Kayla told me the Rx can be used up to mid-April.

And today I’m grateful that this process is moving forward and that I scared Kayla enough to get her to start overcommunicating. Also—once I have that sorted, I’ll follow my the advice of my friend The Pundit’s Apprentice: I’ll start working with a personal trainer to get the infra- and superstructure of my legs into shape so I won’t need to repeat this mishegoss in the future.

Grains of reality

A couple of nights ago I spilled about half a box of couscous grains all over the kitchen counter and the floor.

That stuff is a nightmare—it’s like sharp-edged rice, and it sticks to the soles of your feet (even with socks) like burrs. I didn’t want to dump it in the sink for fear that it would balloon up when wet and clog the drain. Ditto even washing my socks—I have visions of it filling up the washer and foaming out onto the floor.

(After all that, it tasted really nasty (the stuff I didn’t spill)—the spices were weird, and I suspect it might not be authentic. It was, however, old—the box actually had a circle on the top labeled “price”. As in from the days when markets used a labeler jobber to slap prices on merchandise.)

I want a Roomba. But a Roomba that will mop the floor and then climb up onto the counter and wipe that down, too.

Leadership lessons

From 23 December until Monday, my manager took over for the VP, who was out on paternity leave. During that time, he was running not only the product management group, but a variety of co-equal branches of the business unit. Monday morning I left him a mini-bottle of bourbon (his particular tipple) with a snarky note congratulating him for surviving paternity leave.

But aside from the snot, it struck me over the weekend that he must have been under tremendous strain—not only from regular operations, but because Mr. BW has basically stuck a big spoon into the division and stirred vigorously. It did not occur to me until I consciously turned my mind to it at the weekend—because he made it look like it wasn’t anything at all. He was not any less accessible or responsive to our PM needs; everything ran as though we were his only concern. Yet he was responsive to all the other departments as well as us.

During our weekly one-to-one yesterday, something sparked me to tell him that. That I had no notion at all that he was under exceptional pressure because nothing fell on me. He replied that he’d felt plenty of pressure and I responded that I never saw it.

I assure you I have not had the reason or the desire to tell many of my managers anything like this. Today I’m going to inform the VP. I’m sure he knows it, but I want him to know that I know it, too.

Give a mouse a cookie

I do not know what’s going on—it’s nowhere near the end of the quarter, but on Monday two different account managers emailed me separately to ask if I might graciously condescend to grant them a few minutes of my precious time to speak on matters of importance yesterday.

One was fairly direct—he’s working on a deal, and in the course of his rounds discovered that I know someone with the customer involved somehow in making the decision on which vendor to choose. When we spoke, he spent five minutes buttering me up—I work for the division that is the absolute industry leader, that must be marvelous and I must be genius-level smart. But—sadly—when it came to giving him any help, I was functionally useless. I do not know what my friend does in his company, and for that matter, I do not know what the particular solutions are. I don’t do boxes.

But I gave him a few bits of info that I know about my friend as a person (“What about if I host a happy hour?” “He doesn’t drink.”), and he had to go off with that. I know I was a bitter disappointment to him.

When I got the email from the second account manager Monday evening, I IM’d my manager and asked, “Any idea who X is, and why he’d email to ask me if I have five minutes to chat?” Here’s the reply:

“That’s unexpected. He’s a very effective sales guy who works on the [team] team. Keep me posted on how that goes and be mindful of what you offer. If you give a mouse a cookie…he’s going to eat your face.”

Well, yeah.

In the event, this guy was smooth, and a super sharp dresser. I felt like a frump. And I was wearing cashmere. But in this case, I was able to provide more substantive help: I hold the keys to access to one of the products I manage. We’re parsimonious about what we let account managers into; with reason. He was clearly cognizant of that, but he’d paved the way by talking with a couple of people and getting their buy-in.

There was a bit of a kerfuffle, but I got him what he needed, and he was very gracious in his thanks. He told me he’s been with the company a long time, and if I need any help, he knows things.

This is how you build alliances, folks. Being tight with someone who can pull skeletons out of his pocket is a very useful thing. I’ll take that over a happy hour any day.

Return of the father

Our VP returned from paternity leave yesterday. He’d been out since 20 December, and apparently he took the term “out” seriously: as soon as the Help Desk staff got in, he had to go down to get his emails synched on his mobile again.

There must have been tens of thousands of them backed up in those six weeks.

I’m sure this is a relief to my manager, who’d been acting in the VP’s place during this time. He did a bang-up job, but he was working just about all the hours God sends, and we’re in weird times, what with Mr. Big Wheel and all.

WRT what, precisely, is going on, I’m still unclear. Actually, I think everyone’s still unclear about that, including Mr. BW. But with the return of the VP, we have one more layer of sanity to cushion us.

Gratitude Monday: bad medicine

As I mentioned a while ago, I’m in the process of trying to reclaim my knees from decrepitude. When I saw the orthopod two weeks ago, he said that the process of getting the hyaluronate for injections could take four to six weeks.

Last week I found out why.

On Tuesday, I picked up a voicemail from a woman who identified herself as Kayla in the orthopod’s office. She wanted to talk with me “about your injections”. She gave me a callback number including an extension, which she said would be answered “by someone named Julie”, but I should ask for Kayla.

Well, I rang twice on Tuesday, getting voicemail both times. Wednesday morning, I called around 0845, went straight to voicemail again and left a message saying this was my third call and if I did not receive a callback by 0930, my next one would be to the office manager.

At 1000, I called and spoke to someone who said that Kayla only works Mondays and Fridays (not mentioned in her message to me), and that she doesn’t have a direct extension, so that’s why she gave me the Julie line. There was a note in my record that Julie had rung my (home) number at 0927 and left a message.

Well, I spoke with Julie, who said Kayla hadn’t left any notations in my record regarding what she needed from me. She said she’d text Kayla and see what was going on, and she’d call me.

Needless to say, there was no call. On Friday morning, I rang again and asked for the office manager. Naturally the person who picked up the line wanted to know why, and I gave her the 30,000-foot view. She danced around for a while trying to fob me off, and eventually said that Kayla was in the office and would I rather speak with her? I drew in a deep breath and said okay.

Well, Kayla was pretty bolshie—she claimed that she’d annotated my chart and Julie could have asked for the information, nothing to do with her. And it turns out that what she wanted was the exact name of the hyaluronate I had been given five years ago. She claimed that without that information, Cigna (my insurer) might well deny my treatment.

I was dumbfounded, so I asked if she meant that if I’d never been treated with hyaluronate before, Cigna wouldn’t let me start? She assured me that it was entirely probable. So either I dug out that information from my orthopod from five years ago, or live in pain. She was entirely indifferent to which I chose; nothing whatsoever to do with her.

Considering that my insurer at that time never had a problem with the treatment, I find this extraordinary. But whatever.

When I got home that afternoon from my first physical therapy session, I tracked down my PCP from 2015. Fortunately the practice is gigantic (including every possible specialty) and Tina in my old PCP’s office called me verified when I went through several addresses that might be on my records (I hit the jackpot with D.C.); she didn’t make me cough up a phone number that I hadn’t used in five years. She pinpointed the treatment, but had no info on the hyaluronate because that was done by the orthopod.

But Tina connected me with Cindy, in the orthopedist’s office, and Cindy came through with the name. (Orthovisc, if you’re asking.) I thanked her profusely.

I called Kayla back—calling the main number, waiting for a human and asking for Kayla, but do not put me through to an extension that only goes to voicemail. The human kind of sniffed, and then told me that Kayla’s extension is 1422. Interesting, as the Julie-never-answered line is 1411.

Well, I gave Kayla the information. And she thanked me. But it turns out that part of the reason that this process takes so long is that she doesn’t stir her stumps to set it in motion until days after you’ve seen the doctor. She described a future of back-and-forth with Cigna, that—if I’m extremely lucky—ends with the doctor’s office receiving the hyaluronate (for which I pay—again, unlike my previous experience with another insurer) and them graciously condescending to set up the multiple appointments for the injections.

Jeez Louise.

So here’s what I’m grateful for today: that Tina and Cindy, with Palo Alto Medical Foundation, were so on top of things; that Tina gave me the benefit of the doubt on my identity verification; that PAMF had the information I needed; and that I closed out the day at least knowing what’s ahead. I told Cindy that my convos with her and Tina were the best of the day, and I meant it. Would that the staff at OrthoVirginia were as good.