My New Year Haiku

as the new year comes
i prepare myself for the
wonders it may bring

Is it just me or is this stupid?

My mail service pharmacy recently sent me a prescription refill and enclosed was a letter I was supposed to sign.

Enclosed please find our Notice of Privacy Practices. Under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), we are legally required to distribute this policy and obtain the signature of each family member who receives prescriptions through our mail service pharmacy acknowledging that they have received it. Parents should sign on behalf of their minor children.

Please take a few minutes to review the policy, and then have each adult member listed below sign their names in the appropriate spaces.

No problem, except of course that the policy wasn't enclosed. So I called and said that I would be happy to sign the letter as requested, but the policy was not enclosed and that being the case I couldn't sign the letter to say that I had received and reviewed it. I was told by the very confused Customer Service representative, that the policy is never enclosed and that I just needed to sign the letter and send it back.

Seriously...

I refuse to believe that I'm the only person who ever pointed out the lunacy of sending letters to customers asking them to acknowledge receipt of a document they have in fact NOT received.

A bit frustrated with the woman on the telephone, I sent a fax to the company.

No response...

So here we sit in some kind of perverse stalemate. I'm not signing their stupid letter and they're not sending the bloody policy. Of course they can opt to stop sending me my medicine, but I am prepared to fight this. Okay, I'm prepared to fight it for the next six weeks, then it's a moot point anyway.

Stay tuned for developments...

The Facebook Effect

Good grief, it's been a while...

Well it's not like I wasn't warned, I just didn't want to believe it: Facebook can have a disastrous impact on a blog. So in my case, though my Facebook profile is quite developed, my poor blog is looking like a neglected child...

Obviously, I'm enjoying my Facebook self. I've got a decent amount of friends and since most of them are people I actually know and like, I have no complaints about that. There are also some cool applications that could take up quite a bit of my time, if I allowed them to. Actually, I'm thinking of the Movies application and the night I spent hours searching for cool clips from my favorite films and adding them to my profile. Time well spent, I assure you...

The thing with Facebook is that there the applications do the talking for me. God knows what I'm saying about myself with Filthbook, but Virtual Bookshelf and iLike perhaps balance my image. And then there are the postings from my friends that may give some hints about me based on whatever it is they're saying to me or sending me. Then there are the Questions I ask, the Groups I belong to, and the Causes I support, which must also offer a glimpse into my soul. Or maybe not, who knows??

I suppose I have finally returned to my blog because I just need to speak for me myself; and not speak for me by displaying applications or groups that i find interesting. I'm not sure I have anything particularly interesting to say here these days, but I'm back nevertheless and let's just see what happens, shall we?