I suppose the doctor's visit could have gone better.
It started when the cute male nurse came into the examination room to take my blood pressure. He cuffed my right arm and pumped it up and I heard him exclaim under his breath "no way..." He removed the cuff, realigned it slightly and then pumped it up again, this time like a boa constrictor. My fingers started turning purple as he slowly shook his head, quickly removed the cuff and moved over to my left arm. He went through the same drill, looking a little more alarmed.
"Is there a problem?" I asked.
"Let me get the doctor" he said as he bolted out of the room.
The doctor arrived, a little too quickly I thought. Usually you have more than enough time to read one of the year-old magazines cover to cover in the time it takes the doctor to arrive after they've taken your vitals.
He dispensed with any greetings and immediately cuffed my right arm to take my pressure. And then the left. He then whipped out his pad and wrote me a prescription for high blood pressure medicine.
"I want you to have this filled downstairs. Immediately. And take a pill be fore you leave today."
"What's going on?" I asked.
He quickly reverted to his usual reassuring manner.
"Oh nothing" he said. "Your blood pressure is a little high."
180 over 110. That's about the threshold when people start having strokes or heart attacks.
"I wouldn't be too concerned" he said. "It's probably from the long drive in on the 405. That would do it."
Well, yeah, sure.
Or maybe just living in Bakersfield.
Take your pick.
Actually, the reason it was probably so high is I had just gotten off the phone with my worthless insurance company. I had presented my shiny virgin insurance card at the front desk and a few moments later the receptionist called me back.
"Your insurance company says this account has been closed for over a year."
Imagine that. And they had only just that morning debited my checking account for my extortion level monthly premium.
After 15 minutes lost in the phone tree and a couple of disconnections, I finally reached a human at the Worst Insurance Company of America©. She informed me that this account had been closed because they had sent me new cards with a new account number over a year ago. She then read off the address it had been sent to.
Who's address?
Beats the fuck out of me. It wasn't my address, or an address I'd ever lived at.
"Oops" she said cheerily. "We must have put someone else's address on your account."
Because the last thing we'd expect from an insurance company is accurate record keeping. Fucktards.
We finally cleared that up, not that it mattered. This office visit wouldn't be covered because I hadn't met my deductible. My deductible is greater than some nation's GDP and the odds I'll ever meet it in this lifetime are beyond remote.
Once the nightmare doctor's visit was over, I stopped for lunch with an old colleague to catch up and get all the fresh dirt.
My only clue to the state of my old business is the changes I see to everyone's LinkedIn status, mostly going from employed to "Independent Professional", LinkedIn code for "out-of-work".
She hadn't worked most of the summer and she gave the rundown of all the recent bloodletting. It was much worse than I had imagined, agencies gone, people on the street.
The greatest mystery was that once people were let go, many of them simply vanished. A few popped here and there at other agencies, but for the most part people seemed to just fall of the edge of the earth once they were downsized.
I imagined them all trundling off to some great advertising elephant's graveyard.
Like Bakersfield.
