Diarrhea of the Mouth

A character flaw has recently come to my attention. Apparently, I have a tendency to tell stories from my life as an automatic response to memories triggered by the current conversation. You talk about being an english major, and I wax on about the three times I took the same literature class. You bring up multisided dice and I’ll unravel an other-people-story about my old gamer friends carrying suede drawstring baggies everywhere they went. If you say “hey, what’s up?”, I’ll rant about how my job stresses me out because I’m doing this hot project and my manager needs the numbers like yesterday and I really really need some coffee would you please serve me a small light roast I mean dark roast to go wait for here.

What alerted me to this was a conversation with an old friend who was chatting with me about a thing she did and how tough it was. She was venting about the circumstance and seeking some consolation. What resulted was me blabbing about a similar story from my adolescence. I fell into the pattern of the coffeeshop conversation, where you can sit and chat for hours and nothing is really said; it’s more like synchronized monologues. But other people know better than that. She called me out. Said I should write down my stories somewhere. Sell them, make money. Our conversation ended shortly thereafter once I realized I’d insensitively hit her tilt switch, and we haven’t talked much since.

If you notice me doing this kind of thing, call me out on it. Let me know in no uncertain terms that my behavior is annoying. Sure, it’ll hurt like hell emotionally to learn this lesson at such a late stage in my life, but I’ll learn. Eventually, I’ll stop talking and return to being the sounding board everybody wants in their life.

Roller Coaster

Technically, I am in-between jobs. As of Thursday, I am no longer a contractor, and as of tomorrow, I will be a full employee. And it’s about time.

But not without a thrillride, first.

See, on Tuesday, the manager responsible for my conversion got a call from Human Resources, and the message was to walk me out the door immediately. They got the results of my background check and did not like what they saw. That caught him by surprise, so he called my manager and told him the news. My manager threw the time-out signal. He remembered a conversation he and I (fortuitously) had in passing last week about how there’s another guy with my name in this state who’s apparently a criminal. So they immediately grabbed a conference room and phoned the HR staff again to discuss his conversation with me.

Shortly thereafter, he pulled me into the room for a chat, and HR agreed to have the background-check vendor send me a copy of the results. The determination that day was to keep me on as a contractor until a formal dispute could be launched and everything discovered once and for all.

So, Wednesday, that’s what I did. I reviewed the background check and found four notes regarding the criminal record of a man with my name, my exact birthdate, in Baxter county (where College Station is), who apparently has a major problem with drinking and driving and is currently serving the last of his 7 years in state prison for his third conviction. Coincidentally, he’s been in jail during the entirety of my time as a contractor. So I brought all this up to the HR rep, and he prompted me to call the vendor to begin the dispute process.

I explained to the vendor’s operator that I was not this guy, that I’ve had difficulties before with his name, birthdate, and felony record screwing me over, and that I have never been to Baxter county, so she took down some extra info like my driver license number and my biometric info (weight, height, eye color, hair color) and said she’d forward the info to the researchers for reevaluation. They’d let me know in three business days. After the call, it became a sit-and-wait game.

Luckily, they did their work quickly (because it really should’ve been a no-brainer) because they contacted me the next day to announce the other guy’s record has been expunged from mine, and that there’d be a note attached to my record (should they have to do another check on me in the future) stating what happened. I also got a call from HR telling me the head of security reexamined my case and gave me the green light to conversion, that the company apologizes for any potentially embarrassing (read legally-actionable) inconveniences, and that Monday would be my first day as a fully-badged employee with all the rights, duties, and responsibilities thereof.

And it’s about time.

I kinda feel like celebrating, but with the roller-coaster of this past week, I think I’ll hold off until I get my first paycheck. Just to be on the safe side.

Step Ladder

Friday I was presented an offer. Sat down in a meeting room with a member of the Human Resources staff, and he went over the paperwork with me, first presenting me with an offer of employment. The rate of pay is equivalent to what I was making as a contractor, but since the company sponsors most of the benefits (instead of the full amount coming out of my pockets like it does now), my overall net earnings will be more. So it’s like a raise.

I told him I’d take the letter home and think about it over the weekend. Talked in generalizations about it with my coworkers, and loudly they expressed that I should’ve signed it on the spot. “Well, if the pay’s OK, if the position’s OK, if there’s no wiggle room for haggling over pay or benefits, then why the hell haven’t you signed it already!?” So I signed. Beats the hell out of unemployment.

Assuming the rest of my background check passes without a hitch — and I don’t foresee any problems — then my first day as a permanent employee will be July 6th. I’ll have 95% of my benefits covered, which includes health, dental, and vision. Yeah, dental and vision. The company’s not matching 401(k) at this moment, so I probably won’t contribute. But I instantly get ten days of paid sick leave, and I accumulate vacation time, 15 days a year. The vacation time is prorated for the first calendar year of employment, which means I’ll accumulate only 8 days this year, 7 of which I’m required to spend during the holiday closure, so it looks like a proper vacation will have to wait until next summer.

Otherwise, it’s more of the same. Same tasks, same manager, same job. My running joke is, “Hey, congratulations! You’re hired! Now get back to work!” Only difference is that I’m an actual employee now. A fully-recognized human, not a capital expense.

Ladder

My manager told me just before the weekend that the ball was rolling and that I should update my resume on the chance that I’d have to submit it sometime this week. I’m glad I spent some time Sunday cleaning it up, because I was contacted Tuesday to fill out some paperwork and put in my formal application to be converted to a permanent employee. So yeah, I took my first steps to becoming something other than a contractor; it’s been a long 2+ years.

The downside to this conversion is that I’ll be starting at perhaps the lowest rung in the “career ladder” defined by HR. “Client Compatibility Technologist I” (or something of the sort), meaning I’m at the bottom. Entry level.

I don’t have a college degree. Even if I did, it sure as hell wouldn’t be stellar. I don’t have any special training or five-plus years of commensurate experience. I’ve made a few impressions over the years, even got a Spotlight Award from the Director, but that’s not enough to carve out my place in the department. So I can’t expect higher than entry level. I’ll have to actually earn the respect, and that’s the hardest lesson to learn. It’s not enough to have been there for two years, to show up every day, do my job, and go home. When everybody else keeps commitments, puts in extra effort, and makes a point of going above and beyond, the man who does only what’s necessary is at the end of the line.

Among the other hard lessons I’m learning are these tidbits:

  • In a corporate environment, it’s reasonable to expect opportunistic behavior among those who work there; if there’s a chance to take more, do more, be more, and therefore move higher, I gotta take that chance. Think of it as a classroom full of fifth-graders standing around a table, and there’s only two pizzas; the slowest ones don’t eat.
  • All that stuff about taking turns, letting others speak first, minding your manners, obeying your superiors, that’s all hideously bad advice, because nobody else follows the rules. Decorum and protocol have their place in society, but it’s in all the little interpersonal micro-transactions that the obedient are stepped upon.
  • Altruism is largely absent, reserved for only the “good ol’ boy network”. To be in the network, you have to actually be a good ol’ boy, meaning you have to be someone who has worked to garner that respect.
  • I won’t get promoted for being an all-around nice guy; I have to actually work for it. If friendliness was the requirement for promotion, the whole enterprise would be doomed to failure.
  • The company is built around the concept of “meritocracy”, where each individual person is responsible for their own career path. Don’t look to someone else to look out for you. You rise or fall by your own actions; do well, and you’ll be rewarded well. The guys in the highest levels clawed their way up there and were rewarded on their individual merit.
  • So, it follows that expecting a modicum of respect handed to me without expending a respectable amount of effort on my part is just foolish. I start at level 1.

So the ball is rolling. I mentioned my stress at the sudden speed of everything to my manager, and his advice was to not sweat it; it’s all on autopilot from here on out. The position is open to anybody, but I’m pretty much the most experienced person applying for the job (since I’m already doing it), so it should be a shoo-in. Here’s to hope.

Back To the Corner

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.