This year, as I have done for the past two, I sat down and got healthcare for the next twelve months through Healthcare.gov and the Affordable Care Act. As much as I could rage against the irony of that name — I’ve paid literally thousands of dollars in the last few years for something that I have yet to use, thankfully, and I really struggle with calling it “affordable”; for that matter, I still struggle with the insanity that is the US healthcare system in general — that isn’t the purpose of me telling you this. No, I’m telling you as preamble to this story.
I fucked up my submission this year. I knew this because every time I got to the last page of the form, the very last page, I’d get an error message. I’d filled in everything, put all my information in, electronically signed everything, and I’d get the same numerical error each time. I was, to put it mildly, losing my mind over this: partially in terms of frustration, partially panic — the deadline was approaching and I just couldn’t finish the process for reasons I couldn’t understand. Faced with the prospect of having no healthcare next year, I took drastic measures, and called the 1-800 number for assistance.
I used to work in a call center. It was my first job in the US, and I did it for a long time; because of that, I have more patience than most with call centers and call center workers, which made it slightly more palatable to deal with the recorded message I got immediately, telling me my hold time was estimated at 50 minutes. That, it turned out, was a conservative estimate: it was closer to 90 minutes later when I finally got to speak to someone. An hour and a half of the same 30 seconds of music, looped forever and ever.
Here’s the twist, though: the woman I spoke to was amazing. Patient with my grumbling and ineptitude, kind and funny, she not only diagnosed my problem quickly, she went out of her way to fix it — to the point of restarting my entire application on the phone and walking me through it step by step, calmly dealing with me answering the wrong questions and telling me to try again. What was, by any objective measure, a frustrating chore, she made something close to a pleasant experience, or something close.
By the end of the call, everything was sorted out and my application completed and approved. (No, I won’t tell you what I fucked up; it was simultaneously arcane and embarrassing.) I had spent the entire day then increasingly upset and frustrated, angry at both the system and my inability to work inside it, and by the time I hung up, I felt relieved and oddly touched at the way I’d been treated — that someone had taken care of the problem with such good humor and patience. I knew that job, and knew just how many calls like mine she’d likely had to deal with that day; that just made me even more impressed by how things had gone.
It sounds ridiculous, perhaps, but I felt happy and filled with new faith in human nature after the call. It came a week or so too early, but still; let’s call that the first small Christmas miracle of the year.