mathbabe

Who knows what I’m talking about with this story.

My husband dislocated his finger sledding with my son last January, so more than a year ago, and the hospital kept sending us bills for the event.

But here’s the thing, we were covered under my medical insurance, which had perhaps recently changed policy numbers when MSCI took over Riskmetrics. So probably what had happened was my husband had given them the old insurance card, but in any case, in the the end I knew I wouldn’t have to pay since we’d definitely been covered.

The hospital called once a month or so, and every time they got hold of me I argued with them and told them to check their records. They kept telling me that the insurance company was refusing payment under any of the policy numbers I gave them.

In the end, last month, I called up the insurance company myself and got them to admit payment, which wasn’t hard since they said they’d already paid for the X-ray from the dislocation on that date. I called up the hospital and straightened it out.

So yeah, I ended up doing their job for them, and that’s both annoying and exciting because now nobody thinks I owe them $2400. In fact I did a victory dance (at work, because you always have to do this during work hours for people to answer the phone).

But why I’m writing about it today is that it’s actually really infuriating how often something like this happens, and I can’t help noticing that I always get out of it but many people wouldn’t. I’m at a huge advantage in this common situation because:

• I worked as a customer service person so I know how to talk to customer service people. Turns out you should always be polite, but never hang up the phone until your problem is solved. Just keep asking, extremely nicely, things like, “Hmmm… that’s confusing, what do you think could have gone wrong?” or “What would you do if you were me?” or if those don’t work, “Do you think you could tell me who to talk to sort this out? I’d really appreciate it.”
• I am always covered by insurance, so I never worry that they are right. This is an enormous advantage over people who sometimes lose coverage between jobs or something.
• I keep all my old paperwork. Impossible for people who don’t have an incredibly boring stable lifestyle like mine.
• I have a job that allows me to make calls like this during work hours. Obviously huge.
• I am completely unafraid of forms and red tape. This comes from experience, but I know most people are afraid of such stuff, and that alone would probably keep most people from arguing.

I really do feel like I am relying on my professional skills in order to get my insurance to pay for setting my husband’s dislocated finger, when that should be a no-brainer. If you are inexperienced and poor, you’d probably be completely at a loss for how to deal with this situation.

I wonder how many people have their credit scores lowered by medical claims which should have been paid but weren’t due to crap like this. It’s a broken system, but it only leaks on the most vulnerable people, and I hate that.

I’m often accused by my family members of having no imagination.

I really don’t think that’s fair, I think it’s more that they have outrageous amounts of imagination, and I’m normal. My husband will say something at the dinner table along the lines of, “hey I was thinking about what it would be like to live on a planet that’s attached to another planet by a weird system of ropes,” and without skipping a beat one of my sons will start asking questions: “Are they going straight up in the air or slanted? Can you climb up to the other planet? How far away is it?”. Pretty soon they are, and I’m not kidding, arguing about how thick the ropes are and the question of traveling between the planets and the different civilizations that would evolve on these two conjoined spheres. I’m an observer.

When one of them says something directly to me along the lines of, “mom, what if we lived on a spaceship going to Mars and we could only eat a liquid diet and there were no books, only videogames?”, I am usually pretty stumped (fake example, I just made it up, but you get what I mean). It just doesn’t make sense to me, and I’m constantly going back to one of the assumptions and asking why – why no books? Can’t we get books if we have so much technology? This is when my kids roll their eyes and walk back to their room.

I can’t help it, I’m just a practical-minded person. I want to solve problems but I want those problems to make sense.

In pure defense of my own ability to imagine, I came up with the following thought experiment. For some reason, which doesn’t matter (although it can be fun to come up with ridiculous reasons), we are all put into the witness protection program, and have to move to a tiny little town in the south or the midwest and we have to blend in with the townspeople, and figure out how to make a living and how to make a home. Or at the very least, if we don’t blend in exactly, we have to come up with a good story to explain our eccentricities, and it can’t be, “we’re in the witness protection program!”.

The first question is how we can make a living. I usually imagine waitressing at first, then learning how to be a car mechanic. I think of being a car mechanic as the coolest, nerdiest thing you can count on being able to do in a small town. Plus I love those jumpsuits with the grease stains, I would totally rock my jumpsuit, kinda like these guys:

My husband is a bit harder to place. He’s kind of a huge math nerd, with no actual practical skills, so the best we’ve come up with is that he can be the guy who goes around to people’s houses and helps them with their computer set-ups. But as people are getting better at computers, and as wireless systems are getting easier to set up, this plan is becoming increasingly weak.

Then there’s the issue of his Dutch accent. The idea that our story is that we’ve just moved like 60 miles, so we’re supposed to be heartland Americans, and the accent totally messes up that story. Sometimes (in my mind of course) I make him mute, other times we explain it with some weird speech impediment or maybe a stroke. I know it’s ridiculous, but it’s a toughie!

Finally, there are my kids. They are going to have to play along with the story too, but the problem there is that they’ve been raised (intentionally) to be pretty smart-assed. I’m trying to imagine them going to some random school and not giving away that they’re from Manhattan, watch the Colbert Report every night, and have strong opinions about the GOP race (and those opinions are not positive). Put on top of that the atheism thing, and I’m getting worried. I haven’t spent enough time in little towns (say, in Iowa) to really know how weird that would be, but I’m guessing pretty obviously not-from-around-here weird.

This is one of my favorite dinner topics, I suggest you try it.

I’ve come to pretty much despise the word “innovation.”

First of all, it’s painfully overused, whether you work in finance or a start-up.

In finance, when people complain that banks and hedge funds should be regulated because they take dangerous risks that they don’t understand and that taxpayers have to backstop, the response, typically from a chorus of business professors and economists, is “don’t over-regulate, you might stifle innovation!”

Never mind that if you dig down to what is meant by financial innovation, it usually consists of creating weird mathematical instruments or contracts that require a complicated computer algorithm to price. So, pretty much the stuff that gets us into weird messes in the first place.

If I needed to write a sign to sum this up, it would read something like “Please stifle financial innovation!”. Actually, Volcker said it best: “the only useful banking innovation was the invention of the ATM.”

As it’s used in start-ups, the word “innovation” is also mostly painful to experience. For the most part it’s baldly used as a buzzword, by someone with a spiffy presentation who is clearly not himself (or herself, don’t want to be sexist) planning to be innovative.

In such a buzzword context, innovation becomes meaningless. At best, it’s their attempt to encourage and cajole the people around them to be innovative, and then perhaps take credit for such innovation. At worst, they fetishize Steve Jobs, which usually means channeling his perfectionist asshole side, thinking that may spur extra innovation.

What’s particularly sad about the abuse of this word is that it is inherently meaningful, and that I see and read about true innovation every day, mostly gone unnoticed by the spin doctors. Maybe that’s because most of it is too technical for business guys to get their heads around.

Another thing I’ve noticed, is that usually the most innovative people are also the most high maintenance pain-in-the-ass people to work with. Sometimes (often) downright hostile in fact.

I’ve come to enjoy this phase of “creative hostility” as a way of getting through skeptical or openly suspicious questioning incredibly efficiently. If I propose something and my most innovative, hostile critics immediately jump down my throat, that’s a sign my idea was a good one. I know that sounds weird but it’s true.

Actually maybe it’s not so weird. I watched this TED talk by Brene Brown where she talks about shame, vulnerability, and innovation. You should watch it, it’s only 20 minutes and it’s good.

Specifically, she talks about how, in order to be innovative, one must make oneself vulnerable. Even though she didn’t have time to really argue this, it resonates with me. The most innovative moments I’ve experienced are when everyone involved is willing to be wrong (vulnerable) and to smell each other’s bullshit (skeptical). Opening yourself up to other people’s skepticism takes courage.

She also describes how cultural norms can come into play at moments of shame or vulnerability or courage. In particular, this thing where men cannot be seen as weak. I think it explains why, when I see innovation, I also tend to see overt displays of macho behavior.

I wouldn’t have it any other way. I say that because I’m pretty sure the alternative is passivity and indifference, which is totally unappealing.

Here’s what I think. Real innovation is a mess and brings up all sorts of things that people don’t actually want to talk about. That’s why we only hear about some watered-down a posteriori description of it.