Tuesday 01/17/2023
Did the gym round at 8. Then, this was an open day except for the writers meeting. So I made a hasty list of all the things I’d been putting off, and started doing them.
First up was to straighten out access to my IBM medicare advantage account. The problem was that up until 12/31/22 I had had an AARP medicare part B plan which was managed by United HealthCare (UHC). Starting 1/1/23 I have an IBM medicare advantage plan managed by — UHC. Every time I tried to sign in to the new account, following the instructions in the “get started” pamphlet, I would get derailed into the old account, where it would helpfully inform me that my coverage had ended.
It took just under 40 minutes on the phone with the support people to finally get this straightened out. The first suggestion was that I register as a new account. Unfortunately that was rejected because my email was already in the system, tied to the old account. The nice lady seriously suggested that I get another email account with Yahoo or someplace. I politely but firmly rejected that solution. Eventually she was able to push me up two support tiers to a lady who actually knew something about the “HealthSafe ID” system that UHC uses, and she got the job done. I was able to sign in to UHC, and it said, “Oh it looks as if you have two policies, which would you like to see?” and listed both. Yay! Solution!
Once in, my next job (#2) was to get UHC to use electronic funds transfer to charge my monthly fee — which they had already been doing for the AARP account. I expected an issue with this and possibly more phone calls, but by golly, they were already doing it, had already done a successful EFT for my January premium. All good, no effort.
(#3) was to email Katy The Tax. The tax accountant is changing their system of electronic filing to use Citrix FileShare. They’d sent an email introducing this and promising to send an “invitation email” I would use to connect, but it hadn’t come. Sent that.
Here I attended the writers meeting. I hadn’t written anything, so just listened.
The Financial Advisers had coincidentally(?) and simultaneously started using FileShare, and their invite had come and I used it a couple days ago. It’s time for my annual financial review with them. This always involves filling out a complicated questionnaire. This year the form was a fillable PDF in the FileShare system. So (#4) I downloaded it and filled it and uploaded it.
Then I ordered some more low-carb shakes for my breakfast (#5). Then (#6) went to the CHM volunteer site and signed up for Thursday at Shustek and a docent tour on Friday. (My Saturday is open if anyone wants to propose an exciting outing.) Then I walked up to the dry cleaners on Emerson and picked up my sweater (#7).
On return I bumped into Lois and Sherry, 2/5ths of the nominating committee, in the lobby, where they were waiting to waylay Ian, the guy we want to nominate for the RA VP job. So I joined them. Ian is a good person to know, but he immediately and definitely refused to be nominated. As a retired academic (physics prof at Cambridge) he says (in his lovely british accent) he sat on entirely too many committees and won’t do more.
Finally I took the video recording of Jim Eaton’s talk from Sunday into iMovie and edited it, and sent a link to it to Stew and Jim.
Codgerville 