nothing good comes from using the phone

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Phone Calls Bleh

I just got off of back-to-back phone calls and am feeling drained and relieved and, as always, a little self-scoldy because making a phone call is rarely quite as bad as I think it will be. Honestly, even if a phone call IS as bad as I imagined (issue remains unresolved, I have to talk to someone unpleasant, I feel like I have no idea what I’m talking about), it is usually over fairly quickly. Much more quickly than justifies the days/weeks/months of procrastinating, resisting, and fretting before I make the phone call. 

One of the calls was for a dermatology appointment – I have a mole that’s being constantly irritated by non-negotiable clothing, and I would like to have it removed. Plus, I would like to get a skin check. The scheduler seemed to think I could just go for a skin check, and have the dermatologist look at the mole then; I suppose that makes sense, to have him check it out first before he commits to scraping it from my body or whatever mole-removal procedure he uses. I had been delaying this call because I have only been to a dermatologist once before, and I could NOT for the LIFE of me remember her name. So I blurted that out right at the beginning, and the scheduler was very lovely and said she could look it up, and it turned out that my previous dermatologist was no longer with this health system so I will be going to a new one entirely. 

To continue telling you overly personal and yet somehow deeply boring things about me, I figured that as long as I was on the phone ALREADY, I would try to do something that I have wanted to do since January: find a new gynecologist. I had SUCH a bad experience this past time – more than an hour’s wait, with no updates from the staff, in an increasingly crowded waiting room during a pandemic – that I was ready to leave. But I had made no progress toward finding someone new. This is the sort of thing that works best with a referral, but all of my friends see doctors in a different health system, not covered by health insurance. So! I simply asked the scheduler if she could get me in with a new gynecologist. Since I don’t need an appointment until next January, I figured I had a good chance of finding someone. And lo! the scheduler DID find me a new gynecologist and I got an appointment and PHEW. Cross two items off my list. 

The second phone call was with a company that provides entertainment for children’s parties. Specifically, they bring dinosaurs to your event and play dinosaur-themed versions of Red Light Green Light etc, and bring out fossils and talk about dinosaur facts. The dinosaurs are adult-human sized and seem to be half robot, half puppet. Carla is obsessed with dinosaurs, so I think she would love it… but I am a leeetle bit concerned that it will be too babyish for her. Like… maybe it would be ideal for the 3- to 5-year-old set. The woman I spoke to said that eight is on the upper range of the ages they serve – any older, and the kids get a little scoff-y. That was… only slightly reassuring. I mean, maybe CARLA would love it – I really think she would – but maybe her six-months-older friends would find it babyish and lame. And I think having your friends think your party is babyish and lame would be absolutely crushing at this age. Anyway, I am still mulling it. NOTE: If you would like to watch some brief Instagram videos of this company in action and weigh in on the babyishness factor, please email me and I will send you the link. 

Just as bad as the concern over how babyish it might be is the fact that the party would need to take place in my backyard. Please believe me when I say that having a party in my backyard fills me with utter dread. I am pre-stressed by even the IDEA of it. I want to go somewhere that is in the business of kids’ parties, where all I need to do is show up with a cake and some decorations, and they do everything else. And then at the end I can leave. I promise you that I will be stressed enough just doing that. 

(Last week, I did call just such a place! I had a couple of questions that didn’t have answers on their website – in fact, one question was about an add-on that was mentioned on the website, with no further details than price – so I wanted to speak to a human. I waited on hold for a long time just to leave a message. And then got an email last Friday that listed the exact same details that were on the website, and no more. I responded via email immediately, with no response; and emailed again today, only to get an out-of-office reply.)

Sadly, this is going to be a phone-call heavy week. Not only do I have a school meeting via Zoom that I have been fretting about, but I also need to call U-Haul to ask about getting a trailer hitch installed on my car. THAT is the type of phone call I hate the most, because I have no idea what I’m talking about. They will ask questions and I will have no answers. 

I also need to schedule a dentist appointment; I think I need another crown. No need to speculate on why I am dragging my feet on that one.

You know how I mentioned above that I felt a little reproachful of myself for wasting so much energy agonizing over the phone calls when really they weren’t that bad? Yeah, well, that feeling didn’t linger. 

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Phone Etiquette in the Age of Texting

I am looking for information/ideas about how to teach my child phone etiquette. Is that even the right term? What I mean is, how to have a phone conversation with another human.

Do I remember learning how to use the phone? No, I do not. I am guessing that I learned it through emulating my parents. You answered the phone a certain way, you handled the call a certain way, you closed the call a certain way. Those were all things I probably absorbed just from living in my house.

But… How do you teach a child how to use the phone when you can’t teach by example?

My house as an adult is nearly phone free. AS I PREFER, of course. We have no landline. My husband and I each have a cell phone, but we both actively avoid phone calls. I talk to maybe three people on the phone on a regular basis. I call my mom once or twice a week. I call my best friend from back home once or twice a month. And then there’s a mom from school who is a Phone Fan and who calls me, on average, once a week or so.

I do have phone meetings with clients, as well. But those are infrequent and tend to cluster.

All of these phone calls take place, almost without exception, when Carla is in school. Sure, sometimes I am still talking with my mom when I pick up Carla from school. Sometimes the mom friend calls when I am at home with Carla. But those instances are rare. The VAST MAJORITY of all of my human interactions take place via text or in person.

(This is the third time I’ve used the word human in this post; I deleted one of the instances, so you are only seeing two of them. Well, now three since I used it again just a second ago. What is the deal? Am I subconsciously worried that you might think I’m spending time talking to… cats? Birds? The deer in my yard?)

Back to the subject at hand: I wish I could just wiggle dismissive fingers at the whole idea of talking on the phone. By the time Carla’s old enough to want to communicate with her friends outside of school, she will probably want to text them or snapchat them or whatever it is young people do these days.

Be that as it may, being able to talk on the phone is a SKILL. A dying one, perhaps. But one that could come in handy in Carla’s future professional life and at the very least is useful now when talking to her very patient grandparents. (I have a full-body cringe thinking about my poor mom saying, cheerfully, “Hello? Carla? Are you still there?” when Carla has CALLED HER and then given up on the call halfway through, with no heads-up to my mother.)

My parents wind up being the guinea pigs for phone calls, by the way. And I am sure that the conversations are as frustrating on their end as they are on my end (where I am gesturing to Carla to pay attention and stop doing a backbend off the couch and answer the question your grandfather just asked you). But how does a child get better at talking on the phone without talking on the phone?

I have googled, of course. The majority of articles seem to be mainly about… when to talk on the phone (as in, appropriate situations for phone conversation), rather than how to hold a conversation. And maybe THAT’S where I need to start. With conversations.

Because part of learning the phone skill, I think, is learning how to hold a regular old in-person conversation. A conversation is a conversation, after all, no matter what medium you use to hold it. And I definitely could do some additional coaching in that regard. My husband and I try to teach Carla, in our own conversations, with each other and with her, not to interrupt, to pay attention, to ask questions and show interest in what the other person is saying, to take turns, etc. etc. But I admit that we aren’t perfect about it. It’s easy, when there are only three of you, to be a little bit lenient on the interruption front. And when we are all chatting around the dinner table, requiring Carla to look us in the eyes just isn’t super important. Plus, my husband and I both need to be better about putting our phones down when we are talking to one another and to Carla because THAT is certainly giving Carla the wrong idea about what’s appropriate. And it’s easy enough to have a conversation with your parents, or with people you see all the time. It’s a whole other thing to have a conversation with a stranger, or someone you see infrequently. When I am on top of things, I can remind Carla to smile when she says hello, to look the person in the eyes, to do that little “hi how are you fine how are you” exchange that humans do. But I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, most conversations are sort of impromptu, rendering preparation impossible.

Another part of learning how to talk on the phone is, I think, understanding how different it is from in-person conversation. There are no visual cues. You have to convey everything with your words.

And part of it is… a lot of intangible stuff about social cues and social expectations that Carla is still learning. Like… if one grandparent asks if you want to talk to the other grandparent, you say YES, even if it is not technically true. And… as I mentioned above, it is polite to ask how someone is doing, even if you don’t technically care. And… long silences are not a good sign, on a phone call. And… it is totally okay to end the call if you’ve run out of things to discuss, but you need to do it in a polite way, rather than just setting the phone down somewhere and wandering into a different room to build something with LEGOs.

Carla is six-and-a-half. I feel like… this should be something she’s working on, if not something she’s already mastered. But I have no frame of reference. Are other little kids having full conversations via phone? Are other parents working on this skill every weekend? Are we failing our child because we, ourselves, are so phone (and human) averse?

Do I need to start having Carla call one of her friends on the phone, to practice? Should I try to incorporate phone calls into our pretend play? Should I stop stressing out about this and remember that Carla is learning a TON of things right now and this probably doesn’t need to be a top priority?

Probably the latter. But it is really hard to notice gaps in your child’s knowledge and have no real idea how to fill them in.

Sort of how I feel when I remember that she is already six-and-a-half and we have only read half of the Ramona books and NONE of the Little House books and are the Winnie the Pooh years already in the rear-view, because we have yet to read that book all the way through. I get panicky, thinking of ALL THE THINGS I want her to experience and ALL THE THINGS I want her to learn (and read). And yet we only have so many hours in the day.

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Reasons to Leave Your Eye Doctor

You know those tasks that you do every day and some days you do it without a thought and other days you do it while grumbling quietly and other days you hate yourself and your life and you would prefer to abandon your spouse and children and live life in a yurt on a remote island than remove ONE MORE TIME the daily mass of hair from the shower drain? Well, I have reached the latter stage with changing the toilet paper rolls, which seem to ALL THREE need changing simultaneously, only by me, and at an alarming rate of turnover.

Of course, my irritation is on the level of hair strands burrowing in a drain, which is a near infinite distance from the level of My House Just Got Leveled By A Hurricane or My Backyard Is Burning And Has Been Since July or My Country May Or May Not Be In The Imminent Path of Nuclear Disaster. But rather than spend $1,000 on all the gas masks and emergency rations that are in my Amazon cart at the moment, I am turning my thoughts instead to the minutiae of life’s drain-hair-nest of irritations in hopes that it distracts me from The End Times for a while longer.

Something that is high on my list of unimportant-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things irritations lately is my eye doctor. Not him, per se. But his office and their apparent COMPLETE INCOMPETENCE with submitting charges to my insurance company. (Let’s acknowledge all the inherent privileges in this source of exasperation: access to health care, access to eye doctor, access to funds to pay for the services in case my insurance company denies the claims, house standing in a hurricane-free area, backyard absent of fire and smoke, etc.)

My eye doctor – whom I’ve seen for nearly a decade, and therefore do not want to leave, not so much out of loyalty as out of desire not to meet a new person – just joined a larger practice. He used to be part of the University Health System for which my husband also works. Now, he works for a practice called, confusingly, University Ophthalmologists. This is important to my plight.

After the eye doctor joined this new practice, my husband and I each went for our yearly eye exam. (I actually had several additional appointments, but that’s another story and I’d rather not fret about my steady march toward sightless doom at this time.) We got a bill several months later.

The bill says clearly, “If there is an asterisk next to the thing we are charging you for, we have submitted a claim to your insurance for that thing.”

The bill had zero asterisks, and it looked as though – unsurprisingly – none of the items had been covered at all by our insurance, despite the fact that our insurance covers yearly eye exams in full.

Since the bill said we had to pay by X date or face a collections agency, I called the number for the billing office.

The woman who answered – let’s call her Doris – said she could help me. I told her it didn’t look like our appointments had been submitted to insurance. She asked me what our insurance carrier was, and I told her. Recognizing the carrier, she asked, “Is your husband employed by University Health System?” and I confirmed that he is.

That’s when her brain shut down tight like a toddler throwing herself on the floor in prone, immovable refusal to wear the perfectly reasonable pants she already agreed to wear. Doris said, “Well, if you have the employee insurance, we don’t take it. We aren’t PART of the University Health System. We’re separate. Even though our name is University Ophthalmologists, we are NOT part of the University Health System. We are out of network to that insurance because we are not part of the University Health System.” She repeated this information several times and in a variety of ways, lest I misunderstand what she was saying.

When she finally ran through all possible variations on “we are not part of the University Health System,” I brought out my trump card (which no longer sounds as pleasantly triumphant as it should) and told her that we had in fact emailed our insurance company prior to our appointments to make sure that our eye doctor was still an in-network provider. The insurance company had responded that he was indeed an in-network provider.

Doris was still on toddler tantrum mode and this information did not sink in.

At some point she paused long enough for me to finally ask the question I had been intending to ask from the beginning, which was, “Did you actually even TRY to submit the claim to our insurance company? Because the bill says you did not. No asterisks.”

That got through somehow – her brain toddler must have spotted a soothing My Little Pony or something – and she said, no, it didn’t look like they had submitted the claim. So she would do that. BUT MARK HER WORDS, she said, it wouldn’t make any difference because they were out-of-network for my insurance company, not part of University Health, yada yada, the sound of my blood pressure drowned out her words at that point.

Internet, we have since received at least a dozen bills. Some of the claims have been submitted to our insurance. Some have been PARTIALLY COVERED.

One bill showed that part of my routine annual exam was covered… but my husband’s was not. Same exact service. Same exact insurance. So I had to call again. And Doris answered again. And we went through the SAME EXACT RIGAMOROLE.

Perhaps you are well aware how maddening it is to tell someone a fact and have them completely ignore that fact as they steamroll right over you with their own agenda. She was so completely caught up in this “we are not part of the University Health System” thing that she could not see that my insurance WAS IN FACT COVERING THINGS. Nor could she take a breath and look at the identical appointments my husband and I had, and note that there was no earthly reason for our insurance to make a payment on MINE and not on HIS.

The call ended with me asking, again, for her to re-submit the claim (which, again, had NO ASTERISK on their own form which said clearly that an asterisk means it has been submitted and ipso facto LACK OF ASTERISK means it has NOT been submitted). And again, we got a bill with incomplete asteriskage and mismatched claims information. Exhausting.

I am seriously considering leaving my eye doctor because of this! It is not worth going through this every couple of weeks! I never want to speak to Doris again!

And listen, I can empathize with Doris. I can. She probably has to talk to a billion people a day, many of whom are probably confused/enraged by the fact that University Ophthalmologists is not part of the University Health System and therefore doesn’t accept their insurance. That would be confusing and enraging! And so she probably has to shut off the part of her brain that listens so she won’t be bombarded by insults and profanity from angry, frustrated clients. And probably there is a limited number of variations on how insurance companies respond to claims so she likely thinks she’s seen it all. And maybe she’s worked there for fifty years and HAS seen most things and has a good grasp of her job and what can and cannot be done. She’s probably a very efficient, hard-working woman who maybe has too many things on her plate and might be a wee bit exasperated by all these patients the new doctor is bringing into the practice with their associated ignorance about what the word “University” means when it’s part of a practice name. Maybe she hates her job and goes home each night and cries. I try to think of all these things every time I speak to her, with limited effect on my blood pressure.

When the most recent bill arrived, I waited as long as I could. Then I gritted my teeth and geared up to deal with Doris. But! Lovely, reasonable, fresh-voiced Heather answered the phone! Heather, who trotted out the same “we are not in-network for University Health System insurance” line, but then listened as I pointed out that a) our insurance told us our eye doctor is in-network and b) our insurance had been covering some of the claims. And then she agreed that it was odd! And that she would look into it!

I have no doubt that I will be back on the phone with Doris in a couple of weeks, because insurance matters take YEARS to untangle. (Surely I’ve complained here in the past about the insurance company that had “University of City, Name Memorial Hospital” on their list of in-network providers, but the hospital itself put simply “Name Memorial Hospital” on the claims it submitted, so the insurance denied them all? That was a fun one to deal with.) (No.) But maybe, knowing Heather is around, I won’t have to leave my eye doctor altogether?