yeah yeah yeah mortifying ordeal of being known and all that but sometimes a friend mentions something about you that you didn’t think was noticeable and it feels like your heart is being cradled in their hands
Now that I no longer work for the company, and knowing this doctor’s office doesn’t even work with any billing company anymore, I have a wild story to tell you all.
TLDR: I was trapped in a meeting for 16 hours at this rich guy’s house that had a bridge to a literal castle tower that he forced us to use anytime we wanted to go to the bathroom.
Some background if you aren’t in the US: most doctors offices outsource their billing to billing companies. The reason they do this is because medical billing laws are super complicated, even more so if they operate out of multiple states. It basically makes it impossible for them to do everything they need to do to keep their office seeing patients, so they outsource it. Most companies who don’t do this either have a bunch of illegal billing practices that are just waiting to be audited or worse, or they quickly shut down because it’s just too much. Some small practices might hire one or two people dedicated just to the billing side of things, but for most it’s just a mess.
We had this client who owned this really difficult doctors office. It was a specialty provider, and those can get really complicated across the board, so they tend to be real big messes no matter what because the billing rules are so complicated, and also the front office procedures are complicated, and front offices in general have high turnover so no one stays long enough to learn all the complicated bullshit.
But this also means the doctors are high maintenance, and the doctors and the guy who owned the practice didn’t even agree on what should be done and were constantly telling us totally opposite things. When we asked for clarification they’d ignore us only to scream at us later when we didn’t do it right.
The owner lives out in this richy rich suburb mansion neighborhood and he’s so proud of his house, he has his entire upstairs turned into an office. Keep in mind, this house is literally on the direct opposite side of the city from the actual doctors office, so he’s literally forcing all of his employees to travel an hour (without traffic, it would be way more with traffic) to work out of his upstairs in his house. This also made it hard to know where we were supposed to meet this guy for meetings, because he insisted on meeting in person, and he hated our office, so he didn’t like meeting at our office (and I mean, one of our offices was super weirdly set up and we hated that one too, and the other was in downtown in a not great area, I don’t really blame him that much on that one).
So he’d say “meet me at our office at 9am” and we’d show up to the doctors office (which also had meeting rooms….multiple meeting rooms…so it’s not like it was illogical to assume by office he meant the actual office the doctors worked out of). Then we’d get told “what are you doing here? They’re expecting you at their office. Their HOUSE office. On the other side of the city.”
So, we’d be late. and they’d scream at us over it. Then when we started trying to clarify beforehand, they still would change it last minute and not tell us so we’d show up and get the whole scream fest all over again.
Well, this owner decides we need to flesh out all of the rules and procedures. This included their front office, because we were taking some of the phone calls to lighten their load. So they ask us to come up to their house. This was supposed to take at max 2 hours.
16 hours
It took. fucking. 16 hours.
And that’s just when I left. When I left, more of the VP management team is coming in to continue. They didn’t get out of that meeting until 1 am.
As a result of being in this dumb house for so long, I got intimately familiar with it
This house was designed like an Italian villa. Why did anyone need an Italian villa in the middle of fucking nowhere? No one knows. I’ll say, though, it was very pretty. It had massive, intricately carved double front doors, with roman-style fountains on either side of it. When you walked in, you walked into a wine cellar. These people didn’t even drink, so it was empty, but they were proud to own a wine cellar nonetheless.
They had a theater room. One entire wall was the screen, and the seating was comfy theater-style chairs at like. the really nice theaters with the reclining seats (idk if that’s just in the US or elsewhere, but our theaters have that). This is the only thing in this house that if I was rich…yeah, I’d probably have that.
Their upstairs though. That’s. that’s where it gets just. absolutely ridiculous.
Their entire upstairs…wrapping around it is a balcony. just. one, massive balcony that just. continually wraps around the entire upstairs like it’s embracing the upper end of the house.
They had a big ass pool table that converted into a meeting table. which. cool. I guess. I don’t think they played pool, though.
Then. Then my friends. There was the bridge.
They had a castle tower. A castle tower. Why did they need a castle tower that wasn’t connected to their house? Who knows. The only way to get to this castle tower was a bridge. My friend calls it the “Bridge of Khazad Dum” from LOTR, you know, the one where the balrog shows up and Gandalf is like YOU SHALL NOT PASS!!!!
Except…this guy was obsessed with his bridge and would not shut up about it. I guess if you wanted to have a bridge, you could do some pretty cool things with a bridge in your house leading out to a castle tower. Like if you’re rich. Just go full castle dungeon boss and put in a moat underneath it
Or you could be a tad bit more classy, since this is a desert and water is kinda scarce, and put like some natural desert brush. Something that’ll be really pretty to look at. His house was surrounded by it, it wouldn’t have been hard.
No.
The bridge was just. over their dumb, ugly driveway. A driveway. A cement drive way. Not even like. pretty cobblestones or something. Anything would be better than ugly cement.
And he was still so proud of this dumbass bridge over ugly as hell boring pavement and unlike Gandalf, this guy was like “you may ONLY use this bridge.” If you had to take a call, he wanted you to go stand outside on the bridge. Not the rest of the wrap around balcony, which was closer (we literally had a door leading out to the balcony right next to the pool meeting table, the bridge door was a walk to the complete other side of the room). You had to do it on the bridge.
If you had to go to the bathroom (which I unfortunately have to do a lot), you couldn’t use the bathroom that was in the same meeting room as us.
No.
You had to go past the nearby bathroom and go across the bridge to the castle tower, where you then opened that up to a living room/kitchen area, then through another door to the guest bedroom, then through another door to the bathroom and because I had to go to the bathroom more than most people, I naturally didn’t assume this guy was crazy enough to make someone do that.
No.
He chewed me out for daring to use the bathroom closest to us, said I wasn’t allowed to use that one, and that he wanted us to use the one in the dumb ass tower.
I crossed that dumb bridge way too many times than I’d like to have as a result some other side shitty things at this house:
1. He had cameras everywhere. okay. Sure. that’s pretty normal these days, what with ring doorbells or whatever. But one of his employees hit our CEO’s car. And in the middle of our meeting this asshole would pull up the footage of the car getting hit to show his other employees and laugh. Like. right in front of our CEO. I was flabbergasted that this guy thought it was fine to laugh about his car getting hit right in front of him when we were already in a meeting to fix his practice that had gone way over the max time limit.
2. There was no cell service. Or, it was very spotty, depending on your plan. So you really did feel trapped there. I had another appointment after work that day and I couldn’t call them to let them know I had to cancel as a result.
3. His kids. omg. They wouldn’t stop coming to interrupt over…I mean normal kid stuff, but these kids were just. totally oblivious to this stupid long meeting that was happening in their home, and the parents (because the mom was also involved in this) would stop everything to do stuff with them. Which, sure, you should give your kids attention when needed, but you’d also think that when kids come home and start needing things, that would be a good time to be like “let’s pick this up tomorrow.” Not these people.
4. At one point they also were talking about how they were sending their daughter to a summer camp. cool. whatever. Except…this summer camp? It wasn’t actually a camp. It was a week stay at a 5 star Marriot Resort. Apparently, according to them, any other type of camping was just “homeless sleeping.”
So, from then on, whenever someone asks me to do something and says “I’m sorry, this meeting might be really tedious/awkward” I look them in the eye and I go, “Will you keep me trapped at a bridge house for over 16 hours? No? Then I’m not worried at all.”
I’m going to share with you guys a revelation I’ve had about why politics in fiction is so unbearable now, and I’ll probably go on a while, so I’ll just tl;dr right now.
Up until recently, ‘political messages’ in fiction were meant to give you a new perspective on real world issues. Now, political messages use real world issues as shorthand for the message they’re already delivering.
I’m going to give you about the most obvious example I can think of for the former.
Let That Be Your Last Battlefield is hardly Star Trek’s most subtle hour, but it’s still a thought experiment. You’re invited to take the position of a third party and observe black-white race relations through the perspective of an alien being. And in a world of Gorn lizard people and energy beings and that one talking baby, it’s ridiculous that two people who are nearly identical can’t get along because of (ba dum tssh) the color of their skin.
You’re not meant to look at these Star Trek characters and go “oh, this is like black people and white people”–you’re meant to look at black people and white people and go “oh, this is like the characters who had a race war over petty differences on Star Trek. How’d that work out for them?”
In contrast, let’s look at the more recent The Falcon And The Winter Soldier.
The villain and the general plot are meant as a metaphor for the refugee crisis, but it’s really poorly established and constructed and executed, in just about every way. You basically have to have a working knowledge of the refugee crisis to even understand what they’re getting at. But the idea is… and I don’t think they spelled this out until episode four or so, well into the plot, so you just could not understand the fundamentals of the conflict or what anyone’s motivations were and anything…
but anyway, the idea was that after the Thanos Snap, half the population of Earth disappeared, so the developed world welcomed immigrants from the third world to help rebuild society in the wake of all that. But, five years later, when the Snap was undone, everyone came back, so they just kicked out all the immigrants and I guess gave all their property and land and money over to the people who’d come back to life while putting the immigrants in camps. And the bad guy decided to fix that by blowing people up.
Now, I think that could’ve worked as a metaphor, but they didn’t put any effort into it beyond “get it, these people are like refugees”. It didn’t work as an analogy, it didn’t work as a thought experiment, it didn’t work as a parallel.
And they could’ve used the situation to make you identify with the Flag Smashers, to put you in their shoes and ask you to emphasize with them–but they never did. We never saw what they’d been through, what was motivating them, what they were hoping to accomplish.
They just had Sam Wilson deliver a cringe-as-hell speech about how the people we’d seen being terrorists for six hours shouldn’t be called terrorists and the best way to prevent them from being terrorists was to give into all their demands.
The writers went at the story from the position that their audience already agreed with them (or, worse, that their audience was dumb and just needed a strong talking-to to get them to agree) and so they would just present the political message of their story and get happy nods. No effort to educate, no effort to inform, no effort to convince. The whole thing is more of an exploitation movie centered around the refugee crisis than an attempt to address it through fiction.
And that’s the problem with a lot of writing these days. Instead of using a fictional character to explain why something Donald Trump does is bad, they invent a fictional character, say “look, it’s Trump!”, thus he’s bad and they fight him. And it used to be they would have main characters–noble, heroic, sympathetic characters–representing the political positions that they were criticizing!
If Star Trek: Discovery had a good-natured character who was making a good-faith argument about why immigration should be restricted, and other characters opposed him, I don’t think anyone would mind. But they don’t do that. They take a character, he’s Space Hitler, he’s a straw-man for all the politics that the writers don’t like, and they blow him up. Oh, and he’s a straight white man, natch.
“If the Witch knew the true meaning of sacrifice, she might have interpreted the deep magic differently: That when a willing victim who has committed no treachery is killed in a traitor’s stead, the stone table will crack, and even death itself would turn backwards.”
—Aslan, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005)
As you may know I’m Ukrainian. And Ukraine is being at war with Russia for 8 years. They invaded us, they annexed Crimea, they now declared so-called DNR and LNR “independent” right after sending in their troops to support “peace” (peace my a*s). The situation is getting worse.
I ask you simply to support Ukraine, share information, protest against Russia and donate to Ukrainian charities, such as Повернись Живим (here)
This artwork was inspired by the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women (MMIW) movement. This piece is dedicated to all the women who have vanished and whose voices have been silenced. The red hand print indicates solidarity with Indigenous women and girls in North America and Canada who have gone missing or been killed, as well as the media’s and law enforcement’s inaction in the face of this crisis.
Additionally, the orange earrings are a tribute to Indigenous nations’ Every Child Matters Movement, which honors the children lost to residential schools in Canada and the United States.
Honni, I’d want to express my gratitude once more for all of your assistance in the creation of this art.
If you love ads, then this post is not for you. If you love Tumblr but hate ads and want the one to continue without having to endure the other, then this post is literally for you. Hello, you.
As of today, you can set up ad-free browsing on your personal desktop computer, from anywhere in the world, and then enjoy the same effervescent Tumblr you know and love (yes, including mobile) without the interruption of ads. Scroll away.
Some caveats:
It’s $4.99 for a month of pure, unadulterated nonsense.
If you like a discount, you can get 33% off (that’s four months for free) at $39.99 for a whole year. Imagine.
This is opt-in. You don’t have to do this. We won’t make you.
How do you opt in?
Easy! Just go to your Account Settings on desktop and hit “Go Ad-Free.” From there, you can choose to pay monthly or yearly:
And that’s it! You’ll be able to enjoy your favorite blogs and posts without any pesky ads getting in the way.
That’s all for now, Tumblr. Back to your blorbos.
I browsed the notes for this a bit and saw many people tag-commentating that they’d never pay for this since it is trivially easy to adblock.
If you feel this way – please reconsider your outlook.
It takes money to store your blog and the blogs of the people you enjoy reading. Tumblr has to get this money from somewhere for its blogs to continue existing. Tumblr is a service that happens to exist in a universe where it is weird to pay social networks directly, and so companies like Tumblr have to do a weird convoluted money-and-attention juggling thing where various entities that are not Tumblr try to sell you things you probably don’t want. This makes Tumblr have priorities that are closer to “help these people sell to you” than to “make the users have a good time so they keep paying”.
We have good cultural reasons to be reflexively hostile to Tumblr’s decisions. But the one they’re making here where they’re trying to tunnel through to the nicer universe where social networks make money by providing value to users is not one that deserves your anger.
I’m not saying you should pay Tumblr! It is indeed easy to get what they are selling by downloading a few extensions. And even if it weren’t, you shouldn’t pay for things you don’t value. But please don’t have an incredulous “fuck you, why should I?” reaction to the notion that a company that makes a product that benefits you is trying to make money in the most direct, honest way they can.
This attitude prolongs our stay in the ad timeline.
Also, just like with the tipping feature announcement:
A few months ago there were a ton of people saying “I’d actually be willing to pay for tumblr or tip creators rather than have post paywalling or these very harmful ads”
I do agree that there are things that I’d like to see before I commit to paying an annual fee for tumblr (number one being some variety of bringing back NSFW, number two being a way for all users to report any variety of ads because some of the ads are absolutely horrible and not reportable), but this an example of the developers listening to the feedback that the site so aggressively gave them.
If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product.
But if enough people start paying to make Tumblr profitable, then we become customers that Tumblr needs to satisfy and cater to, instead of needing to satisfy and cater to advertisers.
A lot of irrational rules and forbidding of content came from having to keep advertisers happy.
As a conservation biologist, the comments on this story are so frustrating.
I know people mean well, and we surely have a shared interest in animal welfare, but please, please trust the professionals on this one.
Like,
Buddy… what do you think led this bear on a rampage in the first place? Putting food out will only attract more bears and other potentially dangerous wildlife into residential areas. As the saying goes, a fed animal is a dead animal.
I don’t know how to explain to you that humans are also a part of global ecosystems. Where do you suggest people live???
I know this might be hard to understand for someone with zero relevant training, but nobody who’s dedicated their life to protecting wildlife takes pleasure in euthanizing an animal. But please continue telling biologists how to do their jobs, I’m sure you have plenty of other workable fixes.
—
And no, relocation probably won’t be enough. Hank’s so food-habituated, what’s to say he won’t just start breaking into homes elsewhere too? They’ve already tried hazing and other mitigation efforts.
Obviously having Hank moved to a sanctuary/zoo would be the best outcome, but they aren’t always equipped to care for a large animal that’s unaccustomed to captive living. I’m interested to see how this’ll play out, but I wish people’s main takeaway was “hey, maybe nothing good comes of leaving food where wild animals can get at it” and not “wahhh evil biologists want to kill the chonky bear”
You are 100% right about the bear and basically everything, but I’m going to tack on to answer the question “Where do you suggest people live???” because I think this is important for wildlife.
I know a lot of cynics who think humans are a virus (thanks Matrix) and would love to see a big part of humanity wiped out so they can continue living their lives full of overconsumption, business as usual, but actually there is a solution that allows both humans and wildlife to live in harmony:
Skyscrapers.
Now hear me out. This is already happening in a way. Humans are naturally congregating into big cities. But still too many have the dream of detached homes with grass lawns, in sprawling suburbs as far as the eye can see.
Houses are energy inefficient because the heat transfers on all sides, as opposed to sharing walls and floors and ceilings with neighbors. They are most commonly further away from place of work and require longer commute, which translates to more traffic and pollution. And most importantly for wildlife, the amount of land spent per person living in a house is immensity greater than those in a skyscraper.
Soon there’s going to be 11 billion of us and we need to build up, pull away, and leave room for wildlife.
I know it’s easier said than done, I know not everyone can do it, and I know it would require new way of thinking about comfortable living spaces with more green areas around and new types of skyscrapers that aren’t just concrete and steel monstrosities that are depressing to look at.
But that’s the solution. The only solution humans have thought of so far. Build up. Pull away. Leave larger areas for wildlife where humans are forbidden to build and live.
That post that is like “lord of the flies wouldn’t have happened if it had been a bunch of girls instead” and it’s like…..mmmm you didn’t go to a lot of girls sleepovers growing up, did you?
Society wants to perpetrate the myth that young girls are not as capable of violence and developing mob mentalities when that’s not even close to the truth. This is not me saying that girls are bad and evil, it’s just that adolescents of all genders are capable of shocking cruelty and I know damn well the girls who bullied me in middle school would have beaten me to death with a rock if given half the chance.
Ugh, this is such a complicated topic. Women are certainly more than capable of violence and cruelty and I too am tired of infantilization of women.
On the other hand we can’t deny that boys are raised to be more aggressive than girls.
Yet,Lord of the Flies never happened. It’s fiction.
In only similar recorded real-life instance, 6 boys spent 15 months on a deserted island and behaved very differently than the fictionalized version with its cynical view of humanity.
They cooperated, they helped each other, they built amazing things working together.
