Had I crossed into a parallel universe?<\/p>\n
The first bizarre experience was when I called Blue Cross to cancel my individual health coverage. While contracting, I had been paying for the absolute cheapest health care package I could — the kind of package that basically only covers catastrophic events. Blue Cross has some fancy name and number for this package, but they should really<\/em> call it the “Be a good son and pay us some money so that you won’t bankrupt your parents should (God forbid) you come down with a horrible degenerative disease” package. <\/p>\n Anywaaay, I called Blue Cross, got through right away (whoa!) and asked to cancel my policy. The lady told me that A) I had to fax in that request, and B) the billing date had passed for the month, and so I was still on the hook for one more month’s payment. Bummer. I thanked her and hung up, annoyed with myself for waiting too many days. Then two minutes later, the phone rings. “Hello, sir?” Although I<\/em> had given up, she had gone to the effort to ask her supervisor about this. It turned out that if I faxed in the request that day<\/em>, it would arrive in time to cancel for the month. Woo! Yay Blue Cross customer service department!<\/p>\n The second bizarre experience was when I called the IRS with some questions about whether I needed to pay estimated tax for some contract work earlier this year. To my amazement, I got through right away (again, whoa!) and ended up speaking with an IRS customer service rep for about 20 minutes. We went through some options, crunched some numbers,1<\/a><\/sup> and in the end I knew exactly how to proceed. I guess there’s something to be said for calling the IRS in September rather than April, but still — yay IRS customer service department!<\/p>\n At this point I was becoming convinced that I had stepped into some sort of parallel universe where everything is turned upside down. Could Evil be Good? Could Good be Evil? Could violating a business contract<\/a> have actual consequences in the real world?2<\/a><\/sup> But then on Friday night I met up with Pat, Sam, and Mike in downtown Campbell, and none of them were wearing evil parallel-universe goatees<\/a>. Whew. For a second there, I was getting worried.<\/p>\n <\/a>1. I realize I’m a little quirky in that I actually like<\/em> crunching numbers.<\/small><\/p>\n <\/a>2. Nah.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At this point I was becoming convinced that I had stepped into some sort of parallel universe where everything is turned upside down. Could Evil be Good? Could Good be Evil? Could violating a business contract<\/a> have actual consequences in the real world?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}