You know those movie scenes where the boss tells the hero, “I need you in Florida in three days”? And then the hero puts the rest of his life on hold and jumps on a plane to Florida?
Yeah, I’ve always wondered if that happens in real life at all.
Last week my boss told me, I need you in Florida on Monday. I put the rest of my life on hold and jumped on a plane to Florida.
It helps to have a corporate travel office to that has the weight of the company and it’s very extensive travel budget to make it all happen. But, still, I’m the one who did the “spur of the moment travel piece.
We have a project. It’s not going so well. I sometimes feel like Miracle Max,
Don’t rush a miracle man, sonny. You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.
This project is beyond rushed. We have a great team, but we pretty much needed Tom Cruises tech team from Mission Impossible, to pull off our schedule. Any hitch in our giddiyup and we put the release dates at risk.
I worked for Microsoft for nearly a decade. I’ve seen hundreds of release dates come and go. In fact, there was a trick to release dates. Projects typically went for nine months to a year. Teams devoted their lives to the project. They put everything else on hold.
When a project shipped, it was common to have a big party and then everyone would go on vacation. The new program managers would schedule their vacation for a week or two after the ship date. The experienced program managers would schedule their vacation for the week of the project ship date. . .because we always shipped late. The project would then interfere with the new PMs vacation plans.
Anyway, this is not that kind of ship date. We can’t just delay. The start of the project kicks off a months long schedule.
That brings me back to Florida. . .literally. We had to get our computers ready for a critical client check on Tuesday night. That meant I had to fly to Florida to make sure that our computers were ready for the test.
I have the mission. I chose to accept it. Now we just have to execute on it.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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It took me a long time to admit that I was a writer. I’m not sure why I resisted the urge for so long. I’ve written books, magazine articles, technical documentation, training materials, stories, these scribblings, and hundreds of other bits and pieces.
And every time I’ve done it from some closet, or cordened off corner. Each time we’ve moved over the course of our marriage, each new house, we’ve found some small area to make for me an office.
Seven years ago, or so, we bought our current house. At the time, the basement was only partially finished. The state of the housing market meant that the sellers enticed us with a $10,000 bonus to allow us to finish the basement and make bedrooms for the eight kids we had at the time.
My wife did a wonderful job of designing a layout that included six bedrooms, two storerooms, an unfinished bathroom, a modest family room, and a broom closet.
It measures seven feet by four feet. That makes it quite large for a broom closet, but quite small for an office. In fact there wasn’t room for much more than a desk. Not even a chair. My kids fashioned me a (very uncomfortable) padded seat for a bucket.
Eventually, I came into possesion of a beautiful rolltop desk. Fortunately, a rolltop desk is not one solid piece. They come apart. In pieces it was small enough to fit into my cubby hole.
And finally, I got a true chair. The chair also come in pieces. I built it literally in place between the desk and the wall. I’m not even sure if it comes back apart. I know it’s not coming out in one piece.
So, each night after my lovely wife has gone to bed and my kids have settled in for the night, I retire to my hole-in-the-wall and write.
After all, writing is what writers do. We don’t need much space. A broom closet will do.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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Quick trivia question. Which of the following is a line from Shakespeare?
1. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more
2. The game’s afoot
If you said the first one, you are correct. It’s the opening line of Henry V’s famous speech.
If you said the second one, you are correct. Oh sure, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made it a famous catchphrase of a certain fictitious detective, but it’s actually originally from Shakespeare. Not only is it from Shakespeare, it’s actually from Henry V. In fact, it’s the beginning of the last line of the famous speech that starts “Once again into the breach, dear friends, once again.” The ending line is,
The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’
It’s amazing how someone writing over 400 years ago has so much that we still quote today. Two years ago I had an important change to make. I thought about it a long time. I talked to trusted friends and my brothers. Finally, I made a decision and while it was touch and go for a while, it eventually worked out.
And I lived with the decision for two years and it was a good decision. Recently, I’ve had revisit it. Do I keep going the direction I’ve been going? Do I make a change?
I haven’t decided. So, I’m thinking about it. I’m talking to trusted friends and my brothers. And eventually, I’ll have to make another decision.
As I was thinking about it, I was reminded of the second quote, “The game’s afoot.” Although, like most people, I didn’t realize the quote was about 300 years older than Sherlock calling out to Dr Watson.
As a writer, I like to source my quotes. And it was looking it up, I discovered the rest of Henry V’s stirring words. Once more? More likely more than once more. But, it does feel like starting over.
Of course, right after King Henry urges his men into the breach, he follows it up with this (hopefully not prophetic) line,
Or close the wall up with out English dead.
Fortunately, my decision is not nearly so serious and the consequences are not so potentially dire.
You can see a brilliant rendition of the speech by Kenneth Branagh here.
See the entire speech below.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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Henry V Act 3 Scene 1
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o’erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O’erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill’d with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height. On, on, you noblest English.
Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof!
Fathers that, like so many Alexanders,
Have in these parts from morn till even fought
And sheathed their swords for lack of argument:
Dishonour not your mothers; now attest
That those whom you call’d fathers did beget you.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not;
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’
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I don’t know why IT projects always have to kick off in the middle of the night. I mean, after 30 years in the industry I do understand why we kick off our projects in the middle of the night. I’m just not sure why we weren’t smarter about picking a start time.
1:00AM
Of course, that was East Coast time. It was only Midnight in Central time and an early 11:00PM for the guys in Colorado in Mountain time. I think we might have had an engineer on from India and I’m pretty sure it was the middle of the day for him.
Anyway, I was with our client representative at our new facility in South Carolina. We were on a crazy rush schedule. Seems like we were always on a crazy rush schedule when we brought up a new center. But, this one was crazier than the last one. And the last one was crazier than the one before that.
It was a simple step. We needed the client to leak network routes to our center so we could bring up our network. You could also say they had to advertise the routes. Or even publish the routes. Yeah, it’s computer jargon. But, in this case, it’s a short cut word that takes a longer explanation.
Leaking, advertising or exposing a network route means that the client has to communicate with our routers and let them know that they can route data to the client’s network. This is an important step because our IP addresses are being managed by the client. And the tools our agents will use are sitting on the client’s network.
Once they leak the routes, we still have to advertise our own internal routes so that our agents can get to our tools, domain controllers, Active Directory servers and so on.
It’s probably just as technical as it sounds, but fortunately we had engineers on the call to make it all happen. Well, almost all happen.
As the call started off, it quickly became clear that we had a problem. Our engineers had a route set up to our Denver data center. That was all well and good, but the client engineer wanted to know why we didn’t also have a route set up to our Cleveland data center.
The Cleveland MPLS circuit isn’t scheduled to go in until next Thursday.
That’s a problem.
Why?
Because our corporate policy is that we cannot advertise routes to a single data center. If we cannot advertise to both data centers we are going to have to back out this change and reschedule.
You never told us we had to have both data centers connected.
Sorry, you should have known. That’s how we’ve always done it.
Harry Truman once said, “It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.” The same cannot be said for deciding who gets the blame.
Our entire project schedule came to a screeching halt. Our training lauch and our production launch dates were both now in jeapordy. All because we didn’t have that route to Cleveland setup.
I was the lucky person who got to share the news with our vice president,
This is unacceptable, Rodney. Who screwed up?
Well, it wasn’t really anyone’s fault.
We’ve done three sites up until now and none of them had this issue. How can it not be someone’s fault?
I’m not opposed to accepting blame. If it helps my team, I’ll even take the blame myself. But, I was having a hard time assigning blame for this one.
If someone offers to give you a ride to work do you just assume they have a car? If they show up with a motorcycle, who’s fault is it that they don’t have room to take your presentation board? I had a difficult time blaming my network engineer. He had verified that the route to our Denver data center was setup and working.
But, I also had trouble blaming the client network engineer. Every time they set up a new center there are redundant routes. The project manager wouldn’t have known. Sure, I knew, but no one was asking me. And this is a site we set up a connection from a couple of years ago.
There was plenty of blame to go around, but I was having a tough time figuring out where to place it.
The good news is that we were all techy project manager, engineer types. We are good at crisis management. Once we figured out the problem, and realized we were not going to be successful, we immediately came up with a new deployment schedule. We have a change order to get the connection to Cleveland setup. We also have a new time set up to bring the network online. It cuts our window from 10 days to two, so we have much less margin of error to still make our dates.
I really hope it works because if we have another setback, I’m really not sure who to blame.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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What a jerk, right? People who park and take two, or worse, 4 parking spaces. What are those people thinking? Are they better than the rest of us? Do they think their cars are so valuable that they cannot risk parking them like normal people?
Jerks, right? Judgmental jerks.
Or. . . maybe not so much. Maybe they aren’t the judgmental jerks?
Here’s another view.
Is it still judgmental? Is it still wrong to park your car across multiple spaces if you are parking a really long way away from the building?
I have to admit, I have an almost emotional reaction when I see someone parked like this. And yet, why? Are they not being more considerate than I am when I park next to the building?
And yet, no one would say a thing about those cars if they were parked in the first row. And even if they did park in the middle of the parking lot, except between the lines, would I even bother to consider them? Would I take their picture? Would I write 500 words about how they made me feel?
I think we both know the answer.
So, who’s the judgmental jerk? I’m pretty sure it’s not the guy walking an extra 3 minutes across the parking lot to both keep his car safe and avoid inconveniencing others.
Maybe I need to check my assumptions. Do you need to check yours?
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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Want to save $25?
I travel for business. My company pays for the travel, of course. They make it very easy to book travel and get reimbursed for expenses. In fact, I never even even see the expense for the airline tickets.
Like any business, we try to limit expenses, but the company is good at approving legitimate expenses. One of the ones I save them from? Baggage fees.
You know how airlines cahrge you $25 to check a bag? Here’s how to avoid that every time. Never check a bag. That’s sounds simplistic, but it’s true.
Most planes currently fly 100% full. But, there’s not overhead space for 100% of the passengers. As they get toward the end of boarding process, they start to run out. And that’s where you save $25. The airlines will ask for volunteers to check their bag. . .for free.
It gets checked through to your final destination.
If you do choose to carry on your bag, here’s a second quick hack. When people place a bag in the overhead bin, they tend to place it above their current seat. That’s a mistake. Not as big of a mistake as placing it behind your seat. If you are in row 20, never put your bag further back than row 20.
When people start to get off the plane, you will have to wait for everyone to get off before you can get your bag. But, you also don’t want to place your bag too far in front of your seat. There have been cases of people’s very nice expensive bag walking off the plane before they did. And then it’s lost among the 40,000 other people at the airport.
So, the trick is to put it close to you. So, why not right above you?
Because you can’t see it. Instead, always put it in the overhead across the aisle from your seat. That way, when the overhead is opened, you can see your bag even if you cannot yet reach it. And, you are going to have a much easier time pulling it out of the overhead.
Safety that you can exercise as part of your daily routine just makes good sense. . .and who doesn’t want to save $25?
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2019 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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They aren’t very good. They started out red hot. They were beating everyone they played. And then reality hit.
Okay, they aren’t really my team. They are a team I follow. I’ve never played professional baseball and I certainly don’t own a part of the team.
But, like fans everywhere, I claimed them for my own. Not that fans everywhere claim the Seattle Mariners, of course. But, everyone chooses their team.
It’s not just that my team is bad this year. They’ve always been bad with a brief period of moderate success in the early 2000s. In fact, in 2001 the Seattle Mariners won 116 games. That’s the most that any team in the American League has ever won. It ties the record for the most wins by any MLB team. they tied the 1906 Chicago Cubs.
Part of the reason I love baseball is that we can talk about stats that are more than 100 years old and they are still relevant today. (Yes, I understand that is exactly why some people hate baseball.)
The 1906 Cubs didn’t win the World Series. They would win it the next two years, and then go into one of the most famous droughts in the history of all sports, not just baseball. They went 108 years before they won their next championship in 2016. This is considered the longest losing streak in MLB history.
It’s not.
Every team except two have been to the World Series. The Washington Nationals and the Seattle Mariners have never been to the Fall Classic. However, the old Washington Senators went to the championship series in 1924 and beat the Minnesota Twins.
That means that Seattle is the only MLB city that has never had a team go to the World Series. A century plus eight years is a long time. You know what’s a longer time? FOREVER
The Mariners are “rebuilding” this year. That’s code for “We’re going to be really bad, but don’t be too disappointed, it’s on purpose.
They traded their established good players for other teams’ young good players. The idea if they get a bunch of young guys who are destined for greatness and in a few years it will be a good team. It’s not a bad strategy, the Houston Astros did it about 15 years ago and they are one of the elite teams in baseball right now.
But, they don’t have the history of futility that Seattle has. Up until three years ago that the Mariners had a player in Baseball’s Hall of Fame. Ken Griffey Jr was elected in 2016. He was joined by Edgar Martinez this year. In five years they will be joined by Ichiro who retired this year after coming back to Seattle to close out his MLB career where it started.
Maybe by the time Ichiro is inducted as a first ballot Hall of Famer in 2024, the Mariners rebuilding will start paying off. After all, the last time the Mariners were even in the playoffs was 2001 when they won those 116 games.
It was also Ichiro’s first season. Be a nice way to bring his influence full circle.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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It’s popular to complain about facebook. I don’t. Not really. I use it for some stuff, like posting these scribbles and keeping in touch with a few close friends. And I don’t use it for other stuff. I don’t do games. And I don’t do birthdays. If you look at my facebook profile you won’t see a birthday. You won’t even see a high school graduation year.
Oh sure, you could figure it out if you cared. None of us are more than a couple of clicks away from having our secrets laid bare.
Do you know how long it would take a professional thief to steal your car? Less than 30 seconds. So, why do you lock your car if it won’t slow a professional down more than half a minute? Because you are not trying to protect yourself from a professional thief. You are trying to protect yourself from some kid walking through the parking lot testing door handles.
I’ve been in computers long enough to know that there are a lot of kids walking through your digital parking lot testing door handles. I keep my doors locked. Even if the professionals wouldn’t be slowed down by not posting my birthday online.
So, you’ll never see my name pop up on your timeline with a “Today is Rodney’s birthday.” I have friends that know my birthday and most of my kids remember it, so I’m good.
I also don’t post happy birthday wishes on people’s wall. If it’s a friend, I might private message them. Or better yet, call or text them.
If you want to post happy birthday wishes on people’s walls, I think that’s great. I really do. But, it’s not for me. I don’t really do public birthday wishes.
But, today is an exception. It is an exception every year and has been for the past 30 years. Today, August 8th, is the 31st birthday of a program. Like a young girl whose name changed when she got married the program changed it’s name.
WordPerfect Office was born on 8/8/88. It was not a productivity suite. That was the other Office, Microsoft Office. Instead, WordPerfect office was an email system. It was actually several products. It had a DOS Shell program, a Macro Editor, a Program Editor, a flatfile database program and, of course, the email program.
Office was a solid email program. In fact, it was better than Microsoft’s email program. I should know, I supported both of them at different times. Microsoft Mail was a pretty frontend with a terrible backend. Microsoft had purchased a company called Network Courier. They repainted the front end and released a Windows version. Office on the other hand was a solid engine with an ugly frontend.
After a few years, WordPerfect got married to Novell. In the marriage, Office changed it’s name to Novell GroupWise. Meanwhile, Microsoft created an email system from scratch. It was called Microsoft Exchange. The frontend, as you probably know was called Outlook.
Actually, it started with a couple of different frontends including a basic client called “Exchange Client” and the more fully featured Outlook Client. If you’ve ever used Outlook Web Access Client, you might think that was a third client. You’d be wrong.
Outlook Web Access was originally a sample application that was designed to show what Exchange’s short-lived development platform was capable of. It was never designed to be used in production.
Groupwise is still around. It holds a tiny market share. Microsoft Word beat WordPerfect’s word processor and Microsoft Exchange beat Novell Groupwise.
Thirty-one years is a long time for a program, especially a PC program. The PC really started around 1980. The entire industry is only about 40 years old. So, Groupwise, as long in the tooth as it is, is one of the old guard.
So, happy birthday to one of the oldest programs still being used.
Happy Birthday, Groupwise.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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It started simply enough. Just one app, LinkedIn. It quit updating. It was still installed. But, everytime it said there was an update available and I tried to update it, I got a message:
This version is not compatible with your current operating system. Do you want to download the latest supported version?
Of course, I downloaded the latest supported version, because if I didn’t that stupid little red indicator saying there were apps to update wouldn’t go away.
And that’s fine. The “most current version” worked just fine. And everything else worked. Well, except for Venmo. I couldn’t install Venmo either. But, it’s okay. I installed Venmo on my phone and that took care of the need of Venmo.
And my iPad worked just fine.
It wasn’t always that way. Six years ago, I had some disposable income and a need. I spent about $1000 on the very best iPad available: 64GB of space, new Rentina display. The latest OS. It was expensive, but well worth it.
But, time and tides stand still for no . . .computer.
The OS was the first to fail. My iPad is stuck at iOS 10.3.3. The current version is 12.4. There’s lots of software that won’t install on anything prior to iOS 12. Like LinkedIn, or Venmo.
Today Dropbox added itself to that growing list of software that doesn’t run on old hardware and operating systems. I think more and more apps will continue to move to the “you cannot play with this application anymore” list.
I don’t use the iPad as much as I used to. I continue to write this blog on it. Only a very few posts have been written on another device. A few when I lost my iPad for a few days. And a few others written on my phone when I was way out in the sticks somewhere.
But, for most things? I now have an old Android phone. I also have a Microsoft Surface that I’m trying to learn to use. And recently I bought the latest iPod. I used to use my iPad for music as well. But, I now have over 8000. Their are too many for my iPad to hold along with the other apps. So, I use the 128GB iPod.
I own a lot of tools. Mechanic’s tools. I have at least a dozen different hammers alone. I have screwdrivers and sockets, wrenches and pliers. A good share of my tools belonged to my grandfather. I know which ones are his because he used to paint his tools orange. Why orange? So that he wouldn’t get them confused with other people’s tools when he worked on projects with other mechanics.
My wife owns a bible that has been in her family for over 100 years. It was her grandmother’s bible. It has a list of family marriages, births and deaths. It was printed in the 1880s. She cherishes that bible, just as I cherish my grandfather’s tools.
We still use those old things. Most days I read an electronic copy of the bible on my phone. We read from the bible on Christmas and Easter. I use the tools on a regular basis. None of the tools cost $1000.
My iPad will never be passed down to my grandkids. My kids barely are interested in it. In the next few years all the apps will move to the unsupported column. And before long the iPad will join by first generation Kindle that no longer works.
I also have a hard copy bible. It has a leather cover and is thousands of pages long. I record family births, deaths and marriages. My kids already have talked about who will get it after I’m gone. Several of my kids have turned into decent mechanics. I’m sure my tools, and my grandfather’s tools will find a good home once I’m gone.
But, the iPad? The Kindle? The iPod? The Android phone? They won’t ever have a chance to get old. They already are. All the new stuff is old.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2019 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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It’s not my fault.
Did you know that line is used three times in the Star Wars movies? Three times by Han and once by Lando Calrissian.
What makes the lines so memorable is that despite everything those two do wrong, it really isn’t their fault. But, things turn out badly.
I left Microsoft in 2003 after nearly ten years. I decided to go back to school at BYU. I moved my large family from my home in Washington State to my adopted home of Utah.
Not surprisingly, Microsoft had good benefits. They were better than good. They were some of the very best I’d ever seen, health, dental, paternity leave, adoption credits, but mostly the health benefits.
Leaving a company with benefits is a hard. It’s scary to think about losing those health benefits. Back before the Affordable Care Act, pretty much your only option was hugely expensive private insurance, or slightly less expensive Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, or C.O.B.R.A. coverage.
Basically C.O.B.R.A. let you keep your same level of coverage. You just have to pay the premiums yourself.
It was just as expensive as it sounds.
But, it let you keep coverage. And when you have ten kids at home to care for, you can’t not have coverage. One of my sons needed a specialzed operation. The operation was pretty expensive, on the order of $4,000.
But, we had C.O.B.R.A. And the operation was covered. It was specialized enough that the waiting period to get into the surgeon was a couple of months. In the middle of the waiting period we decided to move to Utah. School was starting and we couldn’t wait.
So, off to Utah we went. As a fulltime student at BYU, I was eligable for the student health insurance plan. And it would be a relief to stop paying the sky high C.O.B.R.A. premiums.
But, what about my son and his operation? We made a call to the school’s insurance provider and talked to a very polite young lady.
Yeah, my son needs an operation and I’m wondering if it will be covered under the school insurance?
Is it covered under your current insurance?
Yes.
Then it won’t be a problem. It will be covered under the school’s insurance if it’s covered under your previous insurance.
Now, I ask you, could that have been any clearer? I didn’t think so either. So, even though we had the money, we dropped our C.O.B.R.A. coverage and signed up for the student health plan. We even made sure that we didn’t allow even a single day of “gap” between the two. We knew how important it was to maintain uninterrupted coverage.
And then we scheduled the operation.
Like before it was a couple of months out. Eventually the day arrived for him to go into surgury. We went to the hospital. We prepared my son, who was only 4 years old at the time.
We did everything right, wouldn’t you say? We are experienced parents. This wasn’t our first rodeo. We handed him off to the nurses and we went to wait. Just about the time he was scheduled to go into surgury we got a call from the nurse.
It our normal process to call the insurance company just to double check coverage prior to surgury.
Okay. . .
They said that this procedure is not covered.
Why not?
Well, in their view it’s cosmetic.
So, what do we do?
Well, the only option is to pay it yourself.
We had the money in the bank, although it was earmarked for school. So, we gave the nurse a credit card and our bank account became $4,000 smaller.
Of course, we appealed. After all, it wasn’t our fault.
The appeal was denied at every level, of course. It’s an insurance company we’re talking about. Finally, the appeal got to the highest level. We weren’t allowed to actually go into the council meeting with the insurance and school officials. The school had appointed an ombusman to represent us. He was actually very good at his job and clearly cared about our condition.
He came out of the meeting with a disappointed look on his face.
I explained that you guys called before cancelling your other insurance and were told this was covered. Everyone agrees that there was really nothing you could do.
It wasn’t our fault?
Right, clearly not your fault. And they were actually considering granting your appeal. It was really close.
So what happened?
Well, then the lawyer stood up to talk. . .
No, it wasn’t our fault. Yes, we did everything right. No, I don’t hate lawyers. But, even if you do everything right, it still sometimes doesn’t always come out alright.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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