(Phaysis)

I went out for a high-speed drive across town for a sense of perspective. Needed to get myself outside of myself for a while because I’m really, really in the middle of it. Right now, I’m a dog in a corner, and I’m ready to bite.

Today, I got a bomb dropped on me in the form of two envelopes from my health insurance carrier. Inside is a pair of Explanation of Benefits (EOB). Remember back in March and April when I saw the chiropractor because my back was messed up and I needed help in a bad way? Well, I finally got the insurance statements from all those visits. The end result is that my insurance carrier won’t pay for a single thing; their rejection reason is that the chiropractor isn’t in network. That’s Bullshit with a capital B.

When I was looking for help, I called the clinic; I’ve been to this clinic for 7 years…my general practitioner is there. And, for a while, so was the chiropractor. So I called the office to check, to see if I would be covered if I saw her for my back. The operator said she’d have to pass on the question to the billing department. They called me back and confirmed to the positive that I would have coverage, so I made the first of a series of appointments.

The first visit was nothing but a consultation on Monday. She then sent me for X-rays which I took that day. Then, since she didn’t show up to the office for my appointment on Wednesday, I had to come in Thursday to look over the X-rays and come up with a treatment plan. THEN, finally, had a visit Friday to pop my back into shape…two weeks after injury. She wanted me to visit three times the next week (office visits are $30 copay each time), but I whittled it down to two visits. By the end of that week, it was revealed that she was no longer a member of the clinic and that she would start her own practice elsewhere. So, I didn’t visit her again.

I had been waiting on the EOBs from the visit, but suspected something was dreadfully wrong. All my other EOBs from all the other visits to the various doctors I see produce an EOB from my insurer in short time. Something had to be wrong, and fucking hell, it was very wrong. I tallied up the charges from those five visits and the X-rays: $1270. You read that correctly.

My blood is boiling; I haven’t felt this level of rage in years. It’s an impotent rage because in the wash of corporate displacement and beaurocratic process, I have no target. No one is to blame. Nobody is at fault, and my only recourse is to play the game. I was provided an address to submit a written appeal; you can damn-well believe I’ll appeal. This is Bullshit. If I had known that the chiropractor was out of network, I would not have fucking gone for the first visit, let alone all five. I was lied to. I believed the lie. The one who lied to me didn’t know they were lying. Misinformation happened.

My teeth are grinding. Whatever it was I was doing in my life, whatever I had planned for the weekend, it’s fucked. My teeth are grinding. I’m in a corner, and I am ready to bite.

Ooops.

So, uh, this site suffered an unintended outage. I tried to access my journal last night to make an entry and got this. I was disturbed that I couldn’t use my site. So I went to the website control panel to see what the trouble was, and my login was rejected. Perturbed, I raised the alarms and sent an email to the support team at my host provider, Prohosting, asking to know why I could not use my website.

After that email, I checked my ancient email account at Juno to see if Prohosting sent me anything there like a technical notice of a planned service outage. I’ve had this Juno account since ’97 and I keep it around as my backup technical contact for both my website and my domain name registrations, should something happen with either. It can be said that I never, ever use my Juno account, so I typically log in once every, eh, six months just to clear out the Juno-sponsored spam.

What I found among all the nonsense was a string of automated emails from Prohosting’s billing department declaring that my credit card had been declined. Declined. The first of these messages was back in February, followed by notes stating that my account would be disabled in March, immediately proceeded by a handful of other automated messages reiterating the fact that my credit card had been declined by my bank and that the past-due amount was indeed rising. I was incensed.

I have had this particular credit card for a good year and a half. When I last got a new number, I dutifully updated the billing info. This card does not expire until next year, yet Prohosting’s support team said my card was declined due to my card being past its expiration date. Somewhere, someone screwed up; whether it was one of them or all of me, I still had a locked website and something had to be done.

The only thing to do was to send a second message to the support team, with a copy to the billing department, revealing the evidence gathered from my investigation. My hat was in my hand. As soon as I clicked “Send”, I went to the credit card update form, submitted the details, and hoped for the best.

Support unlocked my site intact by morning, and billing had charged the past due, dropping the penalty fees, to my updated card info. $108 dollars later, here we are.

My wish, my regret in this, is that in none of that time did Prohosting try alternate avenues to contact me. I have an administrative email address at this domain that I check regularly; I have the option to use this address in my profile as my technical and billing contact. But for the sake of safety, should something go wrong with my domain registration, my webhost’s email system, or (as in this case) billing, I would not be able to contact them for problem resolution. So that’s why I still keep my Juno account around. Just in case.

And there it is, the problem. The problem is one of neglect. Neglect on my part because I don’t regularly check my administrative accounts. Neglect on their part because any human operator would have seen the contact form on this site and attempted to alert me. I have been with Prohosting for over nine years, since I first started this website, and I think it is for that reason alone they let me slide for so long. I’ll hold that to their credit.

I saw a dentist a few days ago; my right teeth have been bothering me for a few weeks. Aside from a deep need for a deep cleaning, he gave me some bad news. It’s time again for a root canal.

This is on a tooth that was patched up last year at Castle Dental. Remember my travails with all that dental nonsense? It seems the prior dentist either didn’t remove the whole cavity before doing the filling or he didn’t do the filling well. Either way, I have a cavity that’s just about reached the nerve, a filling that’s coming loose, and I’m screwed bigtime.

My dentist referred me to a specialist in Westlake to do the actual root canal procedure; I called that office yesterday to set up an appointment and got a quote: $743, which is absolute BS.

“Oh no no no, that won’t do. You said you accept my insurance, don’t you?”

“Yes, we’re a contracted agent, but you’ll have to pay out of pocket, and then your insurance may reimburse you according to their policies. If necessary, we could even let you go half-and-half on payments.”

“Still, I can’t do that. Cancel the appointment.”

So today, I called my insurance. It’s true: the specialist is a contracted agent, and they accept my insurance, but that only gives me a 20% discount on services since they’re a specialist. Any regular dentist would fall under the usual insurance fee scale meaning my copay would be $212, a much more agreeable sum. So I’m left with searching for a regular dentist who does root canals. I know of one clinic, but I don’t know if I want to deal with Castle again. Their work on my first root canal was prompt, in-house, and covered under my plan, but I’d have to deal with Castle Dental again.

My tooth is starting to hurt. Time to make a decision soon.

After some careful examination, I decided that getting that ’99 Civic would have been an awful $9500 mistake. Seriously. Luckily my bank would’nt’ve financed it; they turned it down because it was a year too old. After discussing financing with the dealer, they took my credit info, checked my history, and made me an offer: they “sweetened” the deal by dropping the sale price to $6650 + TTL, and “threw in” a 2-year service contract.

So, with $1200 down, about $230ish a month for 3 years, I took those numbers to my boss who plugged them into his spreadsheet. He calculated that the interest on the finance was a whopping 22.1%, and that interest charges would amount to over $2500 for the finance term. Sickening.

I turned the offer down, and the dealer offered to explain things in further detail, saying I’m operating on partial information and that I should give him and the business manager a chance, etcetera. I still declined, and he offered to let me test drive other cars and so on; I drove a Neon and was completely unimpressed. He showed me a “sample” spreadsheet with the offer terms: his sheet said 11%. It was then I noticed that the 2-year extended warranty was actually on top of the price of the car — a trump-up to increase the finance amount. Gracefully, yet fatiguedly, I declined the offer. I most likely will not be returning to that dealer.

I learned this week that I can go to my bank and get prequalified for auto loans; it was my assumption that I had to have a vehicle already picked and ready to buy. Not so. Thursday morning I applied with my bank for a personal, unsecured loan (Wells Fargo’s version of prequalifying). The banker left in her notes that this loan will be for a car, so there will be collateral. We played phone tag on Friday, so I don’t know the outcome of the application, whether I got accepted for my requested amount or if they’ve made a counter-offer, or if I’ve been declined. Knowing this bit of information will affect what I’m looking for.

Until then, I’m resting from the used car battle.

Some replacements that’ve needed to happen for a long time are now happening at once. It’s unsettling.

First is my laptop. It’s old, it’s busted. It has developed a habit of shutting off at random. After some testing, I determined it was either a) that my installation of Windows XP somehow got pooched or b) the power circuitry, cdrom, or battery is intermittently killing it. So, I uninstalled everything, backed up my important stuff to my desktop machine, and reinstalled Windows.

Reinstallation is, for some of us who live on our computers, a debasing ordeal; all your customizations are lost, all the hacks, programs, and shortcuts you take for granted to get your stuff done are completely undone. You realize what it is about the default configurations that drive you to make those changes. And now I’m going back through all that.

So far, everything is fine. The power did zap off during the install so I had to restart, which makes me wonder if it’s actually the hardware instead. If it is, and if I can’t get this thing to run confidently, then I’m essentially without a laptop again and I’ll need to replace it, which is a pricy possibility.

Second, yet foremost on my mind, is The Dragonfly, my 1993 Mitsubishi Mirage. It’s thirteen years old, smokes like a train, fails emissions tests, and is falling apart. So, after eight and a half years of faithful, everloving service, I have to give it away.

In that regard, it’s time to replace it with another car. After very little looking around, I’ve found the car I want: a green 1999 Honda Civic LX. Four doors, five speeds. I test drove it yesterday, and it does well. I put a deposit on it to hold it, and the dealer offered $200 on a trade-in of my Mirage; basically giving it away (with a car that old, I’m pretty sure, the wholesalers will sell it for parts).

What I’m worried about most is this: money. The car, after all taxes, title, license, and dealer fees, will be $9321. I can swing that through financing. And I have $1000 available in my bank account to go towards down payment. But the dealer, it seems, wants $1500. I’m trying my bank’s financing to see what they can offer. A $500 difference won’t make much of a change in the monthly payment amount, but it’ll affect my interest rate. I guess if I can borrow out of my 401(k) plan at work, I can make it all work out, but everything will have to wait until Tuesday when the work week picks back up.

I know that I want this car, and that it’ll treat me well for years, but I am completely full of trepidation. There’s this feeling I get when it comes to dealing with large amounts of money, like I’m in trouble with my superiors or something. I felt it twice every semester back when I was in college: once at the beginning when I signed my promisory notes for student loans, and once at the end when I was signing another loan to round out my account for finals. I felt it when I signed the financing for my Mirage. And I’m feeling it now.

Am I making a $9321 mistake? Did I make a $200 mistake on the non-refundable deposit? Am I outstretching my reach by affixing my signature to the dotted line without more research, more digging, more financial wisdom? I hope not.