going postal

i noticed that i have written fewer and fewer blog posts each month. this is a good thing, i am sure you'll agree. some days i feel much closer to the "enough about me, how's by you?" kind of thing. surely this is a huge milestone in my healing process, and i welcome it with open arms. it's not a comfortable place to be when you're all you can think about.

so life goes on, spring has sprung, we're getting ready for aly's high school graduation (don't try to do the math - i already know there is no way i can have a kid this old). there are good days and not-as-good days (pretty much like everyone's life, right?), there are starting to be more days when it feels like we're making progress and fewer days when i feel like we'll never get through this. but last week when the contents adjuster reported that our entire initial contents claim had been rejected, i have to admit i momentarily considered going postal.

i had sent the contents listings for the kitchen, laundry room, and foyer. three of the fifteen areas for which we will have to provide inventories. one fifth of the way done, i had hoped. it was 28 pages long and i had painstakingly checked and rechecked to make sure that all of the info they required was there, that it was easy for them to read, that i backed up my claim with urls to make their jobs easier...i was aiming to be the model client. we were going to get our money.

except...

somehow i had f'd up and sent 30 pages, so page 1 was a duplicate of page 8 and page 2 was a dupe of page 9. this apparently threw them into code red lockdown mode. unable to comprehend, much less process, this aberration they did the only logical thing - they rejected the entire claim. instead of simply removing pages 1 and 2 and getting on with things or, here's an idea, picking up a phone and calling me to figure it out. but admittedly, it was my mistake and i would have to pay the price.

it's kind of absurd how the whole contents claim thing works, as i have mentioned before (see "the buddhists have been right all along", from march) - but making it even more absurd is the fact that they do everything the realllly old fashioned way. by that i mean: paper. and US mail.

i thought i was doing such a great job initially - i had cut and pasted hyperlinked urls into the spreadsheet to aid the insurance company in identifying the exact models of things i had listed and giving them a reference for and/or substantiating the values that i had put down. when i had finished the kitchen, laundry room, and foyer, i had called the adjuster to let him know that i was about to email him the first of our completed room inventories. he said it would be better if i would send them to him via US mail.

me: "huh?".

him: "yeah, because i work out of my home most of the time and my printer is very slow so it will be better if you print it out and mail it to me".

me: "but if we do it that way, you'll lose all of the hyperlinks - some of which are really long - and someone will have to re-key all of that in by hand."

him: "oh, no one is going to do that."

me: "huh?"

apparently, i was to send him a hardcopy of the inventories, which he would then mail to some clearing center where "the girls" would start searching on the internet for comparable items to those i had listed. i said "so no one is going to use all of these links i have entered?". "nope."

at this point i may have launched into a slight diatribe wherein i touched upon how totally, ridiculously, infuriatingly inefficient this was, and how they really should consider joining the rest of the free world in the 21st century where we don't use slates and chisels anymore, nor do we communicate via smoke signal anymore (in case he was in doubt), and how they were making a traumatic, extremely painful experience ten times worse for their customers.

he totally understood my frustration, said i was preaching to the choir and that he complained about this to his boss practically daily. then he offered this consolatory gem: "well, i guess you could fax them to me."

well, yes, i guess i could do that.