s11e05: What is it like to be a person?
0.0 Context setting
It’s Tuesday, March 1st in Portland, Oregon. Yesterday it rained a lot. Today it’s Bin Day, and not just regular Bin Day, it’s Also Regular Bin, Not Just Composting and Recycling Bin. Woohoo.
This is now 5 weekdays in a row that I’ve written, and the 15 minute challenge is going… great? Nice job me on reframing motivation and introducing novelty to overcome anxiety!
1.0 Some things that caught my attention
If you’re new here (and by “new” I mean you’ve only been reading for, say, fewer than 15 or so episodes), then today’s might feel complicated. Or if not complicated, messy. But then again, what isn’t messy, when it comes down to it?
This is a story about technology and being a person.
Look, I’ve had a crap morning. I was in a bad mood when I got up, and I’m not sure why, the kids were… difficult and by that I know I’m fully aware that they were just being kids and what I really mean was they were not doing what I needed them to do, which was things like, I don’t know. Feed the cat so I don’t get attacked so I can make breakfast and help get everyone ready for the day.
Long story short, a lot of yelling, a lot of crying, a lot of shouting, some hitting and everyone ending up in a worse mood. I know that we can’t control other people, the only thing we really have control over – when we have the space to, I suppose, and when we’ve learned the tools – is ourselves. And what we do affects other people, that’s a natural consequence.
So yeah, I know a lot of this is on me and how I reacted and how I probably didn’t get enough sleep and it’s a sign I’m anxious about something else, and you know what?
I can accept, just, that the fact that my kid said this morning he wishes he wasn’t my son and that I hate him is, better than the alternative, which is what I grew up with and it being incredibly difficult, if not feeling impossible, to communicate emotions. Or even, after long enough, know what they are or what they even feel like.
So when we talk about watching Encanto and being hit by intergenerational trauma and what that feels like on the one hand I roll my eyes at people who throw around a word like trauma that has significantly changed its audience and usage since the PTSD days, and then to cPTSD and so on. But I can see, right in front of me, how things from my childhood are affecting his childhood.
Like I said, there’s a lot of work to do.
And behind all of this, my wife did the hard work, again, this Christmas and got my parents a subscription to Storyworth, so we could learn a little about what their childhood was like. Because, you know. I have no idea.
Given that I already mentioned intergenerational trauma, it mighit not surprise you that there’s a whole bunch of stuff that happened to my parents. And I’ll be honest: I haven’t even been able to read the histories they’ve been prompted to record because from what I’ve skimmed so far, they’re going to be incredibly painful to read. Not because I hate my parents, not at all. But because everyone, in some way, has shit we’ve been handed down and I suppose the job we do is to hand down a little less shit each time.
(My parents read this. I haven’t even been able to tell them that I’ve seen and not been able to read what they’ve written, that’s how fucked up this kind of thing is, so hey mum: it’s incredibly important to me that you’ve been able to do this, and I’m so proud of you and I’m sorry I haven’t been able to tell you in a way that isn’t in front of 2,800-odd other people.)
You’re probably wondering what this has to do with technology.
It’s a short one.
So my therapist retired at the end of last year, finally. She had to make a clean break, she told me, and I was one of the last patients she needed to stop seeing. Told me it’s very hard and she always wonders how patients get on, and she’s very much enjoyed working with me. I will make a joke, one that at another level makes light of the work I have to do and the vulnerability I have to need external praise, which is this: I seriously got all the therapist points. I totally won at therapy with her over the last 11 years.
So I got some referrals for a new therapist. It was hard work: most aren’t taking on new patients, I asked my old therapist for advice about who would work well with me, given what she knows.
It’s taken me four weeks to call back, responding to a voicemail from a provider inviting me to schedule an appointment. Until this horrible morning.
It’s taken me four weeks to call a therapist a friend recommended. Until this horrible morning.
And because I live in the United States, I forgot to check that either of them were covered under my insurance, because you should do that before you make an appointment, otherwise I guess you have to do the socially mortifying work of calling back afterwards and cancelling it, or even worse, or sometimes more typically, going through and actually having the appointment and being billed for it out of network (say, a couple hundred bucks), because you didn’t call ahead of time and cancel (which should be fine, because people cancel all the time and the people you’re calling would totally understand cancelling because the provider isn’t in coverage anymore).
So I go log in to my insurer after I make the appointment to check these people are covered.
First, instead of prioritizing sign-in, it half-assedly remembers that I had an application progress with them earlier this year, so it shows me that. When enrollment is pretty much closed to everyone right now anyway.
Second, I have to do MFA because I’m not dumb, so the insurer sends an email with a one-time code.
Instead of coming from Regence, my insurer, the one-time code comes from, and I shit you not:
donotreply@lexisnexisrisk.com, with now display name.
The subject is “Regence - Your One Time Passcode is nnnnnn”
The unstyled entirety body of the email is:
nnnnnn is your authorization code which expires in 10 minutes. If you didn’t request the code, call 1-888-231-8424 for assistance.
I mean, so this is bad because of phishing and ideally you’d like communication from an insurer to be verifiable and trustworthy. It doesn’t look trustworthy at all. It looks half-assed, and it’s an integration with a third party provider, so thanks for training people that an authorization code might come from a random source.
There’s no branding. Which I suppose is a gift because if there were branding following a style guide, if there were one, then who knows what it might look like, given this is implemented by a third party service.
So that’s the thing that caught my attention today.
Do a better job with designing your one time passcode communications.
It’s Tuesday and hopefully the day gets better and if it doesn’t, I suppose we all get another shot tomorrow.
How are you doing?
Best,
Dan