The GirlAlive Blog

Rodent videos!

I got a Flip camera for myself for Christmas, cause I had earned enough on Cafepress to get one from them for free. So now I can share videos of my spastic rodents.

First, Fudge cuddling with my husband.

Spike and Elvis being annoyed with me.

Jayne with a head full of bedding, with short cameos by Dru and Fred (only a few days before she died.)

Fudgie Burrito!

And thanks to the switch from Moveable Type to WordPress, I can embed these things without problems now. Hooray!

Alana

Election Day

Here is my obligatory election day posting.

1992: The world’s gonna end if Clinton gets elected! He’s Satan and we’re all doomed!
1996: If Clinton gets re-elected we’re doubly doomed! There will be fire and brimstone and babies bursting into flame!
2000: If Bush gets elected, the whole world will collapse! We’re all doomed!
2004: If Bush gets re-elected, we’re so screwed! Everything will fall apart and we will all die horribly! The French will invade and we will all be drafted into the army.

Today: I’m totally not falling for that again. No matter which festering pile gets elected, the sun will still rise tomorrow. You’ll still have to go to work and feed your kids, just like yesterday. It doesn’t matter.

Alana

interviewage

So, how did my interview go?  Ehn.  I’d put my money on me not getting the job.  But we’ll see.  Might not really be my idea of the perfect job anyway.

Alana 

Interview

I’m frustrated with my job.  The management is appalingly bad.  For instance, the main head of coding decided we needed 10 new coders.  None of the hospitals wanted them or even had room for them.  They all got stuck in the hospital I work in.  Six of them don’t have desks.  Three of them are in a room with no network access, so they don’t have computers either.  And the manager (the same one who decided we needed these people) refuses to release the money it would take to wire that room.  So for several months, they’ve been sitting in a windowless room doing nothing.

This same manager decided we need to have everything done within 6 weeks of the patient being discharged.  She won’t tell us why.  There is no urgency in coding.  We’re just collecting statistical data.  Most of the patients don’t have discharge summaries in the system within 6 weeks, and in the stuff I do a lot of the casenotes are still with the pregnant women if their admission was for something pre-natal.  So we’re making stuff up.  We have to use the "first impression" notes from the emergency room and whatever one-word descriptions we can find in the ward admissions books.  None of it is right.  In a job where accuracy has always been more important than speed, our moron of a manager has dictated that we need to sacrifice all accuracy for the sake of speed for no reason.

I hate people who can’t think logically.  Because of this, I’ve been looking for a new job for a while.  I don’t like working in health care.  It’s not what I always wanted to do.  It’s what I did because I couldn’t get a job as a software tester or web designer, and I needed to pay my rent.  I don’t enjoy medical paperwork and the thought of doing it for the rest of my life makes me want to jump in front of a train.

The good news in all this is that I have an interview on Tuesday.  Today I took the bus to where the interview is and saw where I’m going.  I also got a nice new shirt to wear.  I want this job.  It’s a position as a researcher and editor’s assistant for a financial magazine.  It would be a creative job working with intelligent people.  And I’ve always wanted to work in publishing.  It would be ideal.

I’ll let you all know how it goes.  I really need a new job.

Alana 

More weird dreams…

I’m still having weird dreams, thanks to being on Prozac. I’m not sure if I’ll ever beat the weirdness level of the Jon Stewart orangutan dream, but the one I had last night came fairly close.

My husband and I were spending Christmas in Seattle, and we were having Christmas dinner with Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love (apparently thanks to some time travel back to the early 90’s). Courtney was drunk and high and generally staggering around the room (no surprise). Kurt was pretty much just sitting in a corner, as heroin addicts tend to do. Meanwhile, I was playing video games and one of my friends (a musician and music producer from Seattle who will remain nameless) kept passing around cans of what were apparently Mexican chicken genitals in tomato sauce. My husband ate one, after I told him not to, and when he found out what he just ate, he threw up. I woke up shortly after that.

I’m not sure what that all would mean. My friend never consumed or distributed poultry genitals in real life, that I know of. It was all very odd. But I’m considering this dream to be less odd than the other one, simply because it was filled with people who I know well from my days in Seattle.  I’m a Nirvana fan, so dreaming about Kurt Cobain isn’t unusual, especially considering that I’m coding a lot of heroin addicts and drug overdoses and suicide attempts at work lately. So this dream had a lot of familiar parts thrown together in weird ways. There’s still no explanation for Jon Stewart, Carol Channing and orangutans.

Alana

About my former employer.

This post is more serious/political than I usually get, but I found myself ranting about this to everyone around me, and they’re sick of it, so I decided to just post it already.

William McGuire, the now former CEO of United Health Group, has been in the news lately because of back-dating stock options.  As my dad put it, "He pulled an Enron."  I used to work for United Health Group, and I can tell you that his greed and corruption isn’t the only greed and corruption in that company.  In fact, it is only the tip of the iceberg.

I was a claims processor at United for about a year while I was preparing to move to Scotland.  I found nothing but corruption and abuse of employees.

In my team, we were behind in our work because there were about 25 fewer processor than we really needed, so the Bosses (the manager’s managers, who we never saw) declared that everyone must work 10 hours a week of mandatory overtime.  At the same time that everyone was forced to work 50 hour weeks, quotas were increased to unrealistic levels.  At one point, the even implemented "quiet time", where for 6 hours a day we were not allowed to speak to each other.  It was a sweatshop with cubicles.  And why do the employees put up with this abuse?  In Northern Minnesota, United is literally the only place hiring.  There are no other jobs, and if there were, who has time to look for them when you’re working 50 hours a week?

What really made me mad about this abuse was the reasoning behind it.  United has a policy of merit-based raises only.  If you do not meet or exceed the goals they set for you, you do not get even a cost of living increase.  The claims processors had to process over 300 claims a day with 99.5% accuracy, or they did not get a raise.  The middle managers had to get all of their employees to produce those goals, or they did not get a raise.  The Bosses had to meet their budget for the year.  Do you see the problem here?  I do.

The best way the Bosses can meet their goals and make sure to get themselves a hefty raise is to set unrealistic and downright abusive goals for the employees.  If the processors can’t meet their goals, no one below the Bosses gets a raise, so the Boss gets a hefty raise because they stayed well within their budget.  If they did anything to benefit the employees, like creating a nice working atmosphere or hiring enough people to cover the workload, that would cost money.  There would be extra wages to pay and raises to pay if people started meeting goals.  And then they might go over-budget, and the Boss would have to give up his dream of a third summer home.  So because of upper-level greed, my friend Heidi didn’t see her kids for 3 or 4 days at a time because she was working such long hours.  Several of my co-workers were hospitalized for stress-related illness.  (Think about that for a second.  A health insurance company overworked their employees into the hospital.)

United doesn’t just abuse their employees.  They completely screw over their customers as well.  I worked in the mental health division.  There were a lot of health plans where people were actually paying for mental health coverage where they had a minimum of 20 visits and a $5000 deductible.  So they would go to visit after visit, and have to pay for every single visit until their deductible was paid.  And then by the time they had paid off their deductible, all of their claims were denied for being over the 20 visit limit.  There was no way any of their claims would ever get paid.  You’d be better off getting imaginary health insurance from a greasy guy working out of the back of a van.  At least then you’d logically expect to get screwed.

I now live in a country with national health care.  It has its problems, but I still think it is better than the deep corruption I saw in the health insurance industry.  I don’t know if I could ever live in the US again, and the number one reason I don’t want to go back is health insurance.  I hate the waiting lists and government red tape in the health system here in the UK, but it is merely inefficient and incompetent.  Health insurance companies are malignant evil pretending to be merely incompetent. 

Alana