I just got back from a wonderful family vacation - posted pictures, but discovered my camera has myopia. Sigh... In particular, take a look at my cousin and her husband's website for happy wedding pictures.

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So here's a good one.

I have found what has got to be one of the most "customer unfriendly" organizations ever in terms of being able to resolve an issue.

The organization unfortunately happens to be the billing service for my son's pediatrician.

I will state, for the record, that the office manager there is very nice. She has responded to me personally to try to resolve this issue. She's a pleasant person and she understands my frustrations.

However, getting a personal response out of this billing service is more painful than beating my head against a wall repeatedly.

For 7 months, I've been getting claims reportedly rejected by insurance (they were submitting them to the wrong place). Then they lost the payment. Then they misapplied the correction. Resulting in a persistent stream of bills.

The contact methods are as follows:

- In writing
- Via "email" (which is a web form)
- Via "phone"

That last one is really a misnomer. Yes, you use the phone. No, there is no way at all to get to a real person directly. There is a lengthy introduction about how to contact them (and how not to keep repeating your requests). It talks about a response in 24 business hours. That's 3 days. Not including weekends. And then sometimes, the response takes longer to get to you because they decide to mail you a response via US Mail! By which time, if you've listened to the spiel, you're likely to have contacted them again because you didn't hear anything from them! And you get a response back "We've already responded to you, repeating your requests only delays our ability to respond to you in a timely manner."

And then, there is the ultimate implementation of voicemail hell. I've been through every one of the 10 options in their list, plus the "extension" listed on the bill. Every single one ends up in a different voicemail mailbox! They must be spending all their time entering in 10 different codes to get to all those mailboxes. And unlike most places where if you just don't hit anything, you get to an operator....not this place. You get yet another voicemail mailbox (oh, I guess that means 11 different mailboxes).

Talking with the office manager (yes, she called me once and I was actually available to take the call), she recognized this was a problem, but that her management didn't think so. I wonder what it would take to change her management's mind? Too bad my son's pediatrician group is really nice and I'm not motivated to change from the services provided point of view....

This is hilarious (and pathetically sad at the same time).

http://www.evanwashere.com/StolenSidekick

Note that this person is attracting a lot of attention, and he's having problems keeping his website online. However, if you can, read this. It's sadly hilarious.

If you don't know what a Sidekick is, it's like a Blackberry. Look here for more information.

Whomever American Express buys their junk email database from really ought to drawn and quartered.

So normally, junk mail comes in, I look at it for 10 seconds, then toss it.

Today's junk mail was special. Identical American Express financial services mailings. One to my mother (deceased for 11 years), and one to the person I bought a house from 8 years ago in another state. Not to me. Not to my wife. But to my mom and someone whom I did business with 8 years ago.

Mind you, I am the first person to live in my house, so it's not like I got the previous occupant's junk mail. This is junk mail that had to work to find this address....

This is actually getting a special mailing back to American Express and a nasty letter. Sheesh....

So my wife's new MacBook arrived late last week. It's a great little machine. I've not experienced the heat problems that others have had (it idles mid-50's C to a max of 80C). I loaded BootCamp on it, then WindowsXP on it to meet the requirements my wife had for work. Everything went flawlessly. My wife loves the system so much, I haven't had any time to play on it since the day I set it up!

Well, there was one issue -- my wife came to me yesterday and asked why every time she switched back and forth between WinXP and MacOSX the time always got screwed up. Hmmph.

Then, I realized this is exactly the same problem I had with my AMD Athlon64 laptop which dual-boots WinXP and Solaris. The time was always screwed up. So, I borrowed a solution from this entry in Casper Dik's Blog. This entry also has a link to explain why this works the way it does....

Boot MacOSX first. Make sure date, time, and timezones are set correctly.
Reboot into WinXP.
Run regedt32 (if you don't know how to do this, you shouldn't try this....)
Set the following registry key (note, it doesn't exist - you have to create it).

HKLM/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control/TimeZoneInformation/RealTimeIsUniversal

Set the value of the key to

REG_DWORD = 1

In the control panel for Day and Time, make sure your timezone is set correctly and check the "automatically adjust for daylight savings time" box.

Reboot WinXP, you should be set.

I think my wife will be happier with this change.