Not to mention that the people being punished are by definition not good at handling this kind of thing.

That, too! RAGE.

Not to mention that the people being punished are by definition not good at handling this kind of thing.

That, too! RAGE.

I don't generally mind it. The clinic is about three blocks away from one of the locations I work at. The only reason I had to make a special trip out there today was that I got the email that it was ready to be picked up about an hour after I left for work the day I was there. What has made me a RAGE-monster with this outfit is their billing department. I have three different accounts with them. One is for the hospital, one is for the "medical" clinic, and one is for the "mental health" clinic. The Hospital account and the medical clinic account have the same account number. Last year the first few times I made payments to them, I made the mistake of putting all the checks in the same envelop. Their billing department apparently is unable to actually perceive more than one bill stub in the same envelop. So in spite of writing account numbers on the checks, they all got credited to the same account. So then I would get missed payment notices and had to call and make them straighten it all out.

I mentioned this to the nurse in the mental health clinic and she set me up with their My Chart website because I can pay my bills online. And i can control what amount gets paid to which account. For several months I paid them through that website. It did seems like some of my visits did not show up there, but at that point I was not bothering to pay attention to the paper bills they sent. After some months I got a big serious "you are not paying your bill" letter from them. It turns out, no mental health clinic bills are supposed to show up on My Chart.

Except that enough of them had, through inaccurate coding, that I did not realize the pattern. After going a few rounds with them to tease out an explanation, I started making payments as I could afford it on the backlog of mental health clinic bills. And they told me I could make payments on the company website (different from My Chart). There are two separate sites for paying clinic bills and hospital bills on their site. No one told me that. So suddenly I got a missed payment notice from having payment meant for my hospital bill get credited to the medical clinic account. And I did not bother to call and formally work out a payment plan for the overdue mental health clinic bills. I just started sending payments. Eventually I got a notice that they were going to send it to a collections agency. Thbbbpt. I had all but $60 paid off. I paid the $60 to them online.

The day after I did that, I got a letter from a collections agency. So I called the billing department to confirm they had received my payment and would notify the collections agency that the debt had been satisfied. The woman I talked to assured me they would do so, and gave me a date as to when it would be done. A few weeks after that I called the collections agency to confirm that they had received the notification. They had not.

So I called the billing department to see what was going on. The man I talked to told me that the payment I had made had been credited to new charges, and that the old debt still had not been paid.

This is the point at which I started screaming. And throwing things. When I got over the screaming and was merely crying I called back and had someone credit the money I had already paid to the "bad debt", and then paid the new bill.

I find it extremely interesting that these little mix-ups only happen with my mental health clinic bills.

As if this week hasn't piled enough crap on me already. Seems one of the students lobbed a complaint my way. Boss says he will keep it off eval, unless it keeps coming up. He thinks it's just students complaining about anything/everything, and I found my way into the target. He says he hasn't seen any evidence of it, and said not to worry. Says it should be like water and a ducks back. Now. To try and not over think this, and yet, find a solution that resolves the problem. Uggg.

Windsparrow, that is utterly ridiculous.

Omnis, it sounds as if your boss is wise.

Oh, but you should. That way future readers will wonder where the frack that phrase came from.

hah. Historians, fear me!

Andi, I'd say WTF except I've seen it before. It's like they deliberately make it as difficult as possible to pay and manage bills for mental health visits. I'm not a conspiracy person, but I swear, it feels like a conspiracy to get as much money as possible out of a population uniquely ill-equipped to deal with the knots of red tape and the endemic bureaucratic incompetence. I think you should write up exactly what you've said here and send a copy of it to the highest higher-up you can suss out of every agency you had to deal with. And copy the President while you're at it. I admire you for keeping your cool as well as you did; I would have been screaming far sooner, and on the phone too.

omnis, good grief. Some people just complain to validate their existence; as long as your boss isn't worried about it, I say you shouldn't worry either.

omnis, good grief. Some people just complain to validate their existence; as long as your boss isn't worried about it, I say you shouldn't worry either.

Zenkitty has said what I was thinking.

I was thinking about writing up my lovely tale to send to the company president with a lovely CC: State's Attourney General.

I was thinking about writing up my lovely tale to send to the company president with a lovely CC: State's Attourney General.

I say fuck yeah.

To round-up today: Proofreading that needed to get done today got done. I didn't finish washing the dishes, but turns out I didn't need to, so that's okay. I did wash the bed linens, and will be forced to put them back on by the power of wanting to sleep on them. I didn't put away any laundry, screw that. Litterboxes, uh, hang on... okay, litterboxes are clean. The main thing I did today was deal with my dishwasher.

People, heed my words of hard-won wisdom: clean your motherhonking dishwashers. For therein lies an evil, hidden under the bottom of the door, hidden behind the rubber corner-guard things that keep water from coming out, hidden in the filter you can't see without sticking your head in the dishwasher like a confused Sylvia Plath. This evil is the decaying remains of the bits of food that got trapped in the crevices and didn't flush away. This evil smells worse than Lazarus on the second day. This evil is getting on your dishes even as the dishwasher cleans them. Gird your loins, take up an old toothbrush, get on your knees, and scrub the crevices of your dishwasher, as I have done this day, and may the spirit of Lovecraft be with you.

Go, Zenkitty!

le_ n, how goes it?

confused Sylvia Plath

Snirk.

I've had to do that with a dishwasher before.

Cleaning your washing machine is a good idea too. I never really thought about it (other than when I was living at Dad with his super hard water and cleaned out the sieve thing at the hose). But I saw a thing on Pinterest This is the link [link]

I did it and mine had CAT HAIR EVERYWHERE.

At My Plastic Free Life she actually took the machine apart and cleaned it [link]

But I haven't tried that.