Category: Insurance

I NEVER upgrade anything in my technological spiderweb until I have to. Either something breaks or, as the recent case, I get upgraded against my will.

Actually, that’s not exactly true.  The changes my company made to our call/sales application were long overdue. Since any change in one place affects other parts of the tech web, I should’ve predicted I’d have some inconveniences.

With the new upgrades came audio issues for both me and the client. The phone system went down at an annoying rate. Overall, I missed calls, which meant lost opportunities. Then, my assistant sales manager (ASM) informed the team that if we had Spectrum, we’d have to switch internet providers.

I’ve had Spectrum cable and internet ever since I moved into my current apartment the summer of 2010. For the first couple of years, it was free. Then, I had to pay $50/year for it with my apartment lease renewal, which was next to nothing in the long run.

So, yes, I’ve been spoiled. Now that I’ve been working from home with my virtually free internet/cable service, setting my own schedule and clocking fewer than 20 hours/wk most of the time, life was truly good. Until this.

The first time I had the AT&T tech come out, my ASM had given me the wrong information about the upload speed. Once I had the correct information, the tech was long gone. At that point, I optimistically thought the Spectrum upgrade that the leasing office had spoken about might solve the issue. After all, they were bumping up the speed.

Come to find out, speed wasn’t the issue.  The newly upgraded call/sales application no longer communicated well with Spectrum. I even tried working “incognito,” which had solved some issues for other agents, but not my tech issues.

I made another appointment for the following week. The second AT&T guy hooked everything up, even gifting me an Ethernet cable. That afternoon, everything worked like a charm. The second day, I had audio issues to the point I had to call my only sale for that day back twice to complete the transaction.

I fumed. The fucking reason I switched to AT&T was to stop the audio issues!  One friend suggested that my connection was shared with others and when they came home, they drained my speed. That made sense because my connection was good up until when most people would have been off work.

At that point, I knew I’d have to change my work schedule. I had been working from about 3-6:30. Very sweet. At this point, I’d have to log on even earlier, which meant all other aspects of my schedule would change. My recently established yoga and writing schedule would be sacrificed once again.

A few days later, I attempted to print out my new car insurance card. The printer hadn’t connected with the new wifi. I went deep into the tech rabbit hole, trying to get the damn thing to work. I even called tech support, who coached me over the phone to discover a button on the modem I hadn’t seen before, but still, no success.

As a last resort, he offered to send out a tech guy. He informed me that since I had been recently charged for installation, I wouldn’t be charged again. That was at least a silver lining.  Yet, I still had to adjust my schedule for the third tech guy.

Totally worth it. In no time at all, I showed him how the printer was supposed to appear on a list on my laptop, so I could add it. He requested the printer manual, which I kept in the original box in the outside storage closet. Before I could go outside to get the box, the tech asked me to verify if my printer had just appeared. When I asked him how he did it, he showed me the same two buttons on both the printer and modem that I had pressed before, but hadn’t maintained pressure on long enough! I didn’t feel as stupid as someone who forgot to plug the devices in or turn them on, but this was marginally better.

When he asked if I’d had any other problems with the connection, I told him about the audio issues, figuring I’d already problem solved that one. To my surprise, he informed me that I didn’t share a line with anyone else. He asked me to log on and let him see how the system work, using his cell number as a test. I definitely didn’t want to log on at that point since I’d taken the day off, but for the sake of possibly resolving the issue, I went along.

I’d turned the computer on when he announced that he already saw the issue. I was using an “A” Ethernet cable rather than a “B.” He retrieved a “B” cable from his truck, switched out cables, and I DIDN’T have to log on to my calling platform on my day off!

The next day, I logged on and everything worked like a charm. So, until the next system upgrade…

I’ve been an independent health insurance agent for about seven months now.  Before I began, I had brunch with a former coworker, who’d left the dead end situation where we’d both worked as agents. I greatly appreciated her taking the time to meet with me, answer my questions, and encourage me to be far more successful.

We checked in with one another a month later at a different restaurant, after I’d quit my former job and started training with the company where she worked.  I was just one of the latest agents who’d defected to that company for both greater opportunity and to set my own schedule. For the second meeting, I’d chosen the place and we’d invited another agent to join us.

With the success of those Saturday mid-afternoon “brunches,” more agents from our former workplace, who now worked as independent agents for the new company, joined us. We celebrated, shared strategies and marveled at how wonderful our new opportunity was.

Throughout this entire time, we rotated who chose the restaurants and enjoyed trying out new restaurants…until we finally hit one with bad service. It was inevitable. I was so distracted by the horrible service that it became the focus of my experience rather than connecting with my coworkers, which was a shame since we all work from home and hardly see one another in person.

When I returned home, I looked up the restaurant’s website and left the following message, using the “contact us” feature:

“Although the food was absolutely delicious, I will NOT return because the service was lousy. STRIKE 1: host didn’t escort me nor point me in the direction of my friend, who had arrived ahead of me and had left her name. Instead, the host informed me that “we don’t write down names, but you can walk around and find your friend.” I opted to just call my friend, so she could come to the front and escort me to the table. STRIKE 2: Although the server brought all 6 of us water, she, nor any other member of the wait staff, refilled our water glasses.  For a place that has the word “grand” in it, shouldn’t refilling water glasses be an achievable low-hanging fruit? STRIKE 3: I expressly asked for a to-go box because I wanted dessert, ordered dessert, but never received it.”

By the following Monday, a manager reached out to me, first by email and then by phone. She first apologized for the service I received. Then she asked for details, specifically who was the host and server because she wanted to address those women. Then she offered to send me a $25 gift card to try the restaurant again. I’m planning to return to next Sunday.

In the meantime, the one thing I didn’t comment about, but was certainly a factor in my experience was the demographics of the restaurant. As soon as I walked in, I was pleasantly surprised at the diversity of the diners. Even with the upscale atmosphere, I was most impressed by my fellow diners. Given the poor quality of the service, I wondered if the staff, who were also people of color, didn’t feel that my table, which consisted of 4 women of color, a child of color, and a white woman, weren’t important enough to give adequate service to or if all the other tables were experiencing the same thing as well.

What stopped me for mentioning this observation in both writing and during the telephone conversation? Conditioning. I’m so used to not being listened to by white people when I suspect race is one of the factors involved in an incident. I can talk all day long to other people of color, but I don’t want a white person to dismiss my entire claim whenever I suspect race is a factor.

As a a matter of fact, the main reason I hardly ever visit a nail salon in east Austin is because of bad service. Time and again, if the clientele is mostly women of color, the service has been bad. If the clientele is mostly white women, the service has been much better.

The following week, I’d met a friend at one of my favorite restaurants after yoga.  As I told her about my experience the previous Saturday, I looked around and noticed the same rich diversity at that restaurant as well. The big difference was their service, along with their food, had been consistently good.  I went to their website and left the following:

“I recently commented to a friend that the only places where I’ve had bad service at a restaurant, the clientele is mostly blacks and latino with the notable exception of TNT. This is not to say that EVERY restaurant with a majority person of color clientele has bad service. Far from it. It’s just that, the times I have had bad service in Austin, the clientele has been mostly been people of color. I started writing on their comment sections after my experiences in the hopes of doing my part as a woman of color who also enjoys good food, good service and good company. With less than 6% of Black people in Austin, I now feel compelled to balance things out and thank TNT for being consistent with the quality of your food and service. I’ve noticed that your restaurant has a good racial mix of people and your staff members are well trained. Please keep up the good work. I especially like to detox at Bikram yoga and come to your restaurant to retox!”

At this point, I felt very comfortable mentioning race since the overall comment was positive. The manager answered immediately, stating how my comment just made her “heart sing.”

Since I normally eat at home, weeks passed before my next dining review. This next review happened to be the very next monthly “meeting” (more like “happy hour brunch”) with my coworkers. Once again, diverse crowd, delicious food and great service.

“Just had lunch at G—— in the Domain with two of my coworkers.  We are successful women of color who work from home and meet once a month to talk shop and pump each other up for another month of being independent health insurance agents.  Since we try out a different restaurant every month, I’d like to compliment G—— not merely for the wonderful service, drinks and food, but for providing an inviting experience that an ethnically diverse clientele enjoy. I especially want to commend the service that M—– provided us,  from refilling our chips, dips and water glasses without being asked, but cheerfully engaging with us throughout our entire dining experience.”

Again, since this was a positive review, I stated all the factors, which led to my enjoyment of the experience. As a matter of fact, I shared my review of the last restaurant with my coworkers. They agreed that the service was horrible and they’d been tempted not to tip. One in our group hadn’t tipped, but the three of us had. The next day, the general manager replied that she’d share my comment with the manager of that restaurant location.

And then the incident at a StarBucks in PA happened. I’m not a StarBucks customer. Yet, I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to add my two cents, especially since I’d begun letting management know my experiences.  In this case, I wanted them to know my perspective on Dining While Black.

“Kudos to CEO Kevin Johnson for his refreshingly straight-forward apology over the arrest of two Black men who were accused of trespassing at a Starbucks. As part of your company’s investigation into this incident, I’d like share with you 3 criteria to tell if something is about race, taken directly from Ijeoma Oluo’s book, “So You Want to Talk about Race,” pp. 14-15: 1) It is about race if a person of color thinks it is about race; 2) It is about race if it disproportionately or differently affects people of color; 3) It is about race if it fits into a broader pattern of events that disproportionately or differently affect people of color. Lastly, trespassing laws are reasonable, but only enforcing them when black people trespass is a racist practice. Since this incident, many white people have self-disclosed conducting business meetings at Starbucks without purchasing anything and not being approached by management, much less being arrested. I hope this incident leads to more training for all the Starbucks locations to ensure that people of color aren’t demonized/criminalized for doing the same thing that white people do without adverse consequences.”

Like a good teacher, I led with a compliment before diving into the criticisms and suggestions for improvement. I received a boiler plate response, then I heard on the news a few days later that Starbucks would close 8,000 locations for a day’s training to counter “unconscious bias.”

To be clear, we Americans will need the rest of our lives to counter unconscious bias. The collective effort against unconscious bias includes the big movements along with the billions of tiny gestures, far too small to ever make national headlines.

Most of my “dark and stormy” takes form as reoccurring anxiety dreams, independent of the actual weather. Adding flavor to the nightmarish experience are sleep apnea and teeth gnashing.  Like everything else, these dreams have evolved.

My earliest recollection of a reoccurring anxiety dream was when I was a child prior to being school age. I’d dream that one of my grandmothers lie supine on a circular metal slab that rotated. As it began to move, sharp automated synchronous blades sliced her like a pie. I’d wake up, run to the bathroom and vomit. One time, I took control of the nightmare and stopped the blades from chopping her up. That was the last time I dreamed about it.

When I was a young child, I had a funny digestive track and couldn’t mix my food while eating. I had to eat all of one thing on my plate, then the other or else I’d throw up. Eventually, I outgrew that digestive problem.

Then as a Peace Corps Volunteer in my early twenties, my reoccurring nightmares involved my teeth falling out. The worst one was when my teeth had fallen out and a variety of bugs swarmed out of the sockets. Those ended as soon as I finished my Peace Corps service after nearly two and half years. In addition to stress, the malarial prophylaxis I took contributed to “changes in sleep,” as warned on the label.

The latest and most long-lasting genre of anxiety nightmares involve me frantically looking for something: my car keys, my car, a missing shoe. In those dreams where I’m looking for my keys or a shoe, I’m usually in some fancy hotel, going down an endless series of hallways, never quite retracing my steps to find what I’m looking for.

Now, you’d think in those dreams where I’m looking for my car, the setting would be a parking lot, but I’ve yet to have that dream. Instead, I’ve parked my car on some sketchy street and the farther I walk, the more apocalyptic the neighborhood becomes. And it’s always nighttime. Sometimes, I’m walking down a craggy hill or through the forest. Other times, there were some not so friendly-looking clowns walking all around me or chain-wielding thugs.

Occasionally, I even find my car, but I’ve never been able to get in it and drive away. It’s always in some visible state of disrepair where I have to get a tow truck at that time of night, in the middle of an apocalyptic event and my cellphone doesn’t have reception, so one of those sketchy-rapey thug-clowns volunteer to escort me to a bar, but when we get to there, it’s one of those darkened out, dilapidated places with broken out/boarded up windows, no one inside for apparently years as evidenced by all the cobwebs and dust, but allegedly has a working phone.

So, that was the worst of those looking-for-my-car nightmares since during that dream, I declared, “Fuck this!” and not dreamt it since.

Obviously, the moral of these nightmarish anxiety dreams is that once I face the fear in the dream, they no longer reoccur in the same fashion, but there’s always something for me to worry about.  The week before I quit my latest dead-end job, I had a beautiful baby girl in my arms and I was frantically looking around for her parents. Clearly, that little girl did not represent any maternal instincts on my part since I’ve never desired having children and I’m blissfully past child-bearing age. I believe she was a metaphor, either representing my inner child or creativity.

Since I resigned from teaching, I’ve had a series of jobs where I’ve enthusiastically thrown myself into and hit a dead end within a year since none of them have held the intellectual challenge and creative outlet that teaching allowed me until the combination of oppressive high-stakes testing and asshole administrators, ie the anti-educational Texas two-step, motivated me out of the classroom.

I remember years ago when one of my friends declared that people just needed to do their self-actualization on their own time and when they’re on the job, just work. After all, she reiterated, that’s why it’s called “work.” This is the same friend who’d also confessed in an unrelated conversation that her inner child was dead.

Well, my inner child is alive and still creatively curious and energetic about the world. At times, my mind is so stimulated about pursuing a new project or worried about something that I need to strategize my way out of, I can hardly sleep or when I do, I pick up on a new genre of anxiety nightmares like tuning into a new season of American Horror Story.

Here’s the latest one since starting my new job: the setting is one of those big multilevel houses horror movies just love. For some inexplicable reason, I’m one of the chaperones of a children’s birthday party in this dimly lit house. The woman of the house, who’s also the only other adult besides this creepy-looking maid, comes to me in a panic about some of the children having wandered off and she wants me to go find them since she suspects they’ve gone upstairs unsupervised.

I recruit four kids to go with me and we all hold hands as we walk upstairs where the lighting is even dimmer. As we get to the middle of the staircase, I notice a doll version of the creepy maid with her back against the wall, slowly sliding down just above the banister. Before she goes past us, I quickly grab her and run to the kitchen.  I have the doll by her throat and I partially wake up at this point to slow down the progression of the nightmare to consider my options.

Then I go back into the dream. I still have the doll, clutched by the throat in my left hand, and I use a kitchen torch burner to set it on fire, but then I rewind the dream. Instead have the doll clutched by the throat with metal tongs so I don’t burn my hand when I light it on fire. I rewind the dream again. I have the doll clutched by the throat with metal tongs, but before I set it on fire, I gesture a cross with my right hand over the sink full of dishwater, saying, “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, I bless this water.” Then I set the doll on fire, burn it to a crisp and plunge it into the water I just blessed. I was determined not to have that demonic doll return in another anxiety dream! She represented the doubts I had whether I’d make enough money as an independent health insurance agent.

Why, it was absolutely delightful the next week when I dreamed that my sandals had disappeared when I’d slipped them off while attending a meeting. That anxiety dream was joyfully clown-, thug-, and demonic doll-free. I did the prerequisite searching under skirted tables, looking for my sandals before I took control of the dream. I declared during that dream, “I’m going to reach into this bin, pull out my sandals, put them on and walk out of here.” And so I did.