You're Not The Dalai Lama

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published September 24, 2015] © 2015 

I was hugely dismayed to walk into a local doctor’s office recently and see the following sign:

Please be advised that your waiting time could be extensive. If you are unable to continue your wait, please let the receptionist know and she will reschedule your appointment. Thank you for your understanding and patience as the doctor takes the time to provide excellent medical care to all.

Here’s the translation:

We make absolutely no effort to schedule in any meaningful way or to respect the time and comfort of our patients. Be prepared to sit here all afternoon because we have egos the size of Connecticut and think the sun rises and sets on our board certified tushies. Should you get so fed up that you leave, our hostile office staff will assure you that the same thing will happen the next time so you might as well suck it up and stay since you’ve already paid for parking.  Regardless, we’re keeping your co-pay.

They weren’t joking about the “extensive.” Sorry, guys: this is ridiculously bad management disguised as dedicated health care. All medical offices – in fact, anyone in a field that books appointments – has to figure out appropriate scheduling. Failing to even try is just rude and disrespectful. What part of the word “appointment” do you not get?

A glutton for punishment, I confess I had actually had contact with this group once before in 2012. My then-primary care doctor had referred me there for a consult but merely achieving a human to schedule an appointment took some 14 phone calls over three days. Even during business hours, I kept getting a message to “please call back during business hours.”
 
On the third day, I systematically tried every one of the eight options but got a recording on all of them (even the one for doctors which I confess gave me a certain perverse pleasure). On Option 6, the authorizations line, a truly crabby troll chastised people for taking up her time by calling, admonishing them that if it hadn’t been at least two weeks, don’t bother leaving a message.

On my first appointment there in 2012, I waited a little over two hours in a waiting room that was so packed that people – elderly people – were standing. When I came back to review my test results, I waited an hour and forty minutes. I refused to come back a third time.

 

So what possessed me to go back there again? My new primary care doctor wanted me to have another consult with a different doctor in this group. Please note that there are no lack of doctors in this specialty in La Jolla. (These folks must throw one helluva Christmas party.) When I called, sure enough, I got voice mail. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. But in fairness, I would like to note that their voice mail now sports a less cranky troll who notes that if has been less than 14 days for an authorization, “please be patient.” They still don’t want you to leave a message, but the delivery is a ton better.  Sometimes that all you can hope for in a doctor’s office, that they’re less rude than they used to be.

Having decided that I would call these people only once, I was about to search out a different specialist the next morning when an actual human returned my call from the day before. The prompter response gave me hope that they had changed in the last three years. But then I arrived and saw the sign.

Now one might think that the right approach would be to come at least an hour late. Don’t even think it. They are clear that they expect you on time even if they aren’t.

I had the prior week’s New York Times crossword puzzles in my purse in case I had to wait. I checked in and filled out all the usual insurance and medical history forms clearly indicating why I was there. Before they called my name, I still had time to do the Saturday crossword which, I may say, is usually a bear.

I was encouraged when I was taken to an examining room and told that the doctor would be “right in.” “Right in” in their world turns out to be a half hour and I had done the Friday puzzle and started on the Thursday.

When the doctor arrived, he asked me why I was there (um, it’s on those forms I filled out) and when I told him, he handed me a brief questionnaire asking me to check which of the following 10 symptoms I had. I quickly checked off the five that applied to me and handed it back.  “No,” he says, “I want you to really look at it.  I’ll be right back.”

“Right back” meant going to see another patient. In the meantime, I managed to finish the Thursday puzzle and even start on the Wednesday.

The doctor reappeared and we reviewed my case. Then he stands (bad sign) and heads for the door. “Let’s have you take off your shoes and socks,” he says. My shoes were slip-ons.  “Ready!” I chirped, hoping to forestall his exit.  But he’s already gone to see another patient.

Unfortunately, the earlier-in-the-week puzzles are a lot easier and I finished both Wednesday and Tuesday, now finding myself staring at the walls.  That’s when I noticed the sign on the cabinet:

If you have ANY medical problems after your appointment or if your condition worsens, call immediately and make an appointment to see the doctor. 

Of course, the worsening of your health was probably caused by the 200 point increase in your blood pressure from sitting in their waiting room all afternoon.  I love the idea that you’re supposed to call. Except, of course, that they don’t answer their phones. By the time  they responded, you’d already be embalmed and on display at your local mortuary.

In fairness, did I feel I got a good, if installment-driven, medical consult? Check. Was he nice? Double check. Go back again? Not on your life. Because no routine doctor’s appointment should take five puzzles.

 

 

 

The Perfect Teacher

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published September 17, 2015]  © 2015 

I don’t think there is a parent out there who wouldn’t agree that if there’s a good teacher-child fit, the school year flies by. A bad fit and it’s a long year indeed.

I should probably interject that there might not be anything wrong with the teacher other than that she doesn’t like your kid. As hard as it is to accept, your child may be a total pain.

You try to work with the teacher, of course. But at what point do you decide that it’s time to try to change classrooms, or even schools? A friend’s free-spirited child pretty much had his tushie firmly affixed to The Bench at his tightly-wound local private school. In fact, we heard so much about that time-out bench that it became incorporated into our lives as well. (“Olof,” I’d say to my husband, “do that one more time and you’re going to The Bench!”)  Ultimately, she moved him to public school where he thrived.  

It’s a fine line between trying to make everything perfect for your child versus concluding that the kid is just going to have to suck it up.

And that doesn’t change after elementary school.

My older son, Rory, was either adored or hated by his teachers. He had a teacher one year named Mr. Munzer who truly brought out the best in him, made him excited about learning, or even more, about behaving. At the time, I would have liked to have cloned Mr. Munzer and had him teach Rory for life. But that’s just not the way life works and it’s probably for the best. Rory would have missed a lot of life lessons along the way. Like, for example, what happens when you drive to berserkness someone who has power over your grades.

I’ve written quite a bit about Rory who could best be described as a parental terrorist in training. There was nothing he enjoyed better than getting an adult – parent or teacher – totally wound up.

When Rory was in eighth grade, all the kids were required as part of their PE class to run around the track within a certain time limit. Rory never quite made the grade (but not for any lack of physical ability). The PE teacher, whom Rory decided to target, decided she would make Rory her personal project, working with him every day after school.  As she told me at the time, she wanted every child to succeed.

Okay, maybe not this one. About three weeks into this endeavor, I picked up my phone at work to hear a woman screaming “I HATE your child! I have NEVER hated ANY child as much as I HATE your child!!!” I was hoping it was a wrong number but alas, I knew just which child she was referring to. It had taken her that long to realize that Rory, in collaboration with his digital watch, was running around the track precisely two seconds slower every day just to annoy her. You could be a quadriplegic and get an A in PE at this school. But she threatened to give Rory the first F in the school’s history.

I know some parents feel that their child’s teacher has it in for the kid, but I’ve always felt that if a teacher called me at home or the office, it wasn’t because they didn’t have anything else to do.

 I rarely heard from a teacher about my younger son, Henry, who was always a dedicated student and athlete. But in the spring semester of Henry’s senior year of high school, I got a call from the AP Physiology teacher who reported that she didn’t like his attitude. Actually, I didn’t like his attitude either. In fact, I didn’t much like HIM at the time. That spring, his spirit had already left for college but his body had to remain behind. I don’t know who suffered more.

Now, Henry had logged ten AP classes during high school and captained two sports teams so nobody could accuse him of being a slacker. Discussing the situation with him that night, he complained that the teacher was terrible; she had them coloring in diagrams of organs. Total waste of time, he protested. OK, sounded totally lame to me too. 

I had logged a lot of hours in the employment world by that time, 12 of them as a single working mom after my divorce from the kids’ father. I told Henry to think of this course not as the study of physiology but as an exercise in getting along in the real world. If he could master this, his future work life would go much smoother. You only have to deal with a teacher for an hour a day for nine months, I noted. In the work world, your boss might be having you do idiotic assignments for years at a time. You only have two more months with this lady until you graduate. Unless, of course, she gets so annoyed that she fails you in which case you won’t. Then you’ll be here for another year or until one of us kills the other. So figure out a way to do what she asks so that she’s not calling me again which I told her to do if you don’t shape up fast. 

I think it might have been the most important course he took in high school. 
 

Adventures In Babysitting

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published September 10, 2015] © 2015 
 

Recently, we spent four days in L.A. babysitting our grandchildren – 5, 4, and 14 months – paroling our son and daughter-in-law for a much-needed get-away.  Overall it went well. There were, however, three heart-stopping episodes but fortunately nothing that could not be resolved by either (1) acetone (2) phenobarbital or (3) the realization that the house wasn’t on fire after all.  

Fortunately, we were provided the assistance of a babysitter as Olof and I were clear that we were not up to the task on our own. Each of those kids has more energy than Olof and I have combined. Further, the 14-month-old, like all of his ilk, is positively drunk with happiness at his new mobility and makes a break for the nearest object of peril the second you take your eyes off him. He needed one-on-one.

And so we arrived in L.A. with our dog Winston. Now, you may remember that Winston is actually their dog but he has spent so much time at our house that in January we took official ownership of him. Our son and daughter-in-law adore Winston – he was their wedding gift to each other eight years ago – but like most English bulldogs of his age, Winston has developed increasingly serious and time-consuming medical problems. 

Concurrent to Winston’s health woes, my daughter-in-law and two friends started a YouTube channel for moms with young kids that has been so successful that it has been featured on Good Morning America and the Today show; their thrice-weekly video site has 15 million views a month. They are delighted, of course, but my daughter-in-law’s overstretched life could no longer accommodate urgent veterinary appointments with three tots in tow. 

Now, normally the older kids would have had summer activities for part of the day but these had mostly ended. So we arrived with plenty of projects planned. We made homemade slime (borax, Elmer’s glue), planted herbs in little pots, read tons of stories, watched all manner of endearing theatrical performances, mediated the usual number of “He’s being mean to me!” altercations, tried to explain that in checkers you either have to use the red squares or the black squares but not both, and otherwise enjoyed our time with them. 

At 5 a.m. the second morning we were there, however, there was a sudden loud blast from the smoke alarm in the hallway right outside the kids’ bedrooms. Let me tell you, that will get your adrenaline going. Fortunately, the blast stopped as quickly as it started. There was no smell of smoke, and we recalled that our smoke alarms had occasionally, maliciously, done this as well. It’s like smoke alarms get bored and decide to toy with you.  (It’s not the same noise as the low battery indicator water-faucet-torture beep that smoke alarms make - also maliciously - at night.) But anyway, false alarm – but no coffee needed THAT morning. We were seriously awake. 

The second night we were there, after everyone had gone to bed, I was horrified to find Winston having a seizure. Fortunately, my arsenal of Winston medications included some doggie phenobarbital that my daughter-in-law had bequeathed me. Since Winston has only ever had a seizure at his L.A. home and not ours, he had obviously become sensitized to something at their house during the last two years while he was mostly living at ours. 

Now, Olof and I had to concede that a seizure for either human or canine was not an altogether inappropriate response after a day with three kids five and under. But the kids are incredibly gentle with Winston and there are plenty of places in the house he can escape. My theory? The L.A. folks eat mostly organic and use all green cleaning products. Maybe it’s too much of a shock for Winston’s aged immune system to go from our house where we don’t eat organic and the cleaning products are toxic. Definitely a puzzle. 

On the third day, the two older kids were giving me a mani-pedi while Olof was on toddler-stalker duty. Granddaughter accidentally knocked over the whole bottle of Mommy’s special bright red nail polish on the light colored kitchen floor. When the sitter tried to clean it up, it only succeeded in expanding it onto a nine inch diameter red blob which was impervious to kitchen cleaning products. We Googled “nearest hardware store” and dispatched Olof to acquire acetone and Magic Erasers which fortunately did the trick. Whew! That one was going to be hard to explain to Mommy! And if she asks if I’ve seen her red nail polish, I’m going to plead the fifth.

So: Mom and Dad are back home, we and Winston are back home, everyone survived, and a good, if exhausting, time was had by all. Now Olof and I are thinking of our own four day retreat. We’ve earned it. 

Manicure by four-year-old

 Winston as a gift pup (6 weeks old)

Technodespondence

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published August 27, 2015] © 2015 

There are infinite numbers of things that can go wrong with your computer. And Microsoft thinks of new ones every day.

I have a personal hate-hate relationship with all things technical which includes computers, software, cell phones, and the entire workforce of Time Warner Cable. I am suffering from serious technodespondence.

I really don’t do anything that weird.  I’m very careful about what emails I open, have good virus protection, rarely sext, don’t do social media or download videos.  So it is truly unfair that I’m dealing with as many techno problems as I am.

 

Even ten years ago, if your computer was working fine on one day and you didn’t mess with it, it would be working fine the next day too.  Not anymore. 

Unsolicited updates (that would be you, Microsoft) and undesired upgrades (Internet Explorer anyone?) are the curse of the modern world. They guarantee that whatever worked before will never work again.

 

For example, all of a sudden these red circles with white exclamation points started appearing on my desktop files.  Not a good sign. Many aggravating hours later, it turned out that I needed to go to McAfee, my virus protection software, and select Disable Icon Overlays in Windows Explorer.  But I never enabled them in the first place!  Turns out to be some stupid McAfee upgrade that I didn’t ask for that alerts you that this file is not backed up. Like, I need to be tortured by my own virus software?

 

On my iPhone, I accidentally upgraded to iOS7. I began to notice that I was missing most of my calls – it often wasn’t ringing even when I was holding the phone in my hands.  My daughter-in-law finally explained that iOS7 had activated “Do not disturb,” as an “upgrade” (hah!  HAH!) that keeps your phone from ringing if you’re in “sleep mode” (which apparently happens after you haven’t used the phone for about seven seconds).  Of course, I didn’t actually activate it because I had never heard of it, wouldn’t know how to activate it and didn’t want it in the first place.  Because it was eating all my calls!  Worse, it kept coming back! A stealth app.  Gaaahhh!

 

On-line “Help”, alas, doesn’t speak English.  (Actually, human help usually doesn’t either.) You have to know what you did to undo it.  (See “icon overlays,” above.)

 

For most new software, there IS no tech support (we’re talking about you, Google), other than “community groups” for which you are depending on the kindness of totally inept strangers. My experience with community groups is: 

(1) nobody answers your question

(2) lots of people answer your question but none of the solutions help

(3) I can’t understand any of the solutions

(4) the solutions will mess up my computer to the point that the original problem will seem insignificant.

 

Change one little thing on your computer and it’s like the butterfly in Australia that flaps its wings and causes tornados in Kansas.  Trying to fix it changes enough things to add monsoons in Asia. 

I have a mug that says “The chief cause of problems is solutions.”  I believe it fundamentally.

Error messages, meanwhile, are a cruel psychological test. The one thing you can be assured of is that whatever it says is NOT the actual problem.

It goes without saying that if Olof crumps before I do, I’m going to have to throw myself on top of his coffin and let them pile dirt on top of me. This is my worst fear, being left alone with my electronics. Every new appliance we get is more terrifying than the last.  In my nightmare Olof-less world, the grandtots mess up the remote and I never watch TV again.  Because who do you get to fix that stuff?  Messed Up Remotes R’ Us?  THIS, unemployed twenty somethings, is the career of the future. 

 

I just can’t keep up.  I don’t WANT to keep up.  I just want everyone to leave my electronics alone.  I don’t want those 22 Microsoft “Updates” to automatically upload (download?) on my machine when I go to turn it off. I know for a fact that there are evil forces contained in them.

 

And I want to opt out of all cloud-related activities.  Sunshine only!  I want messages that go from here to there without stopping on some intermediary planet. 

 

If I were president, I would make it a law that no software can be released that isn’t supported by actual humans who:

 (1) answer within 15 minutes

(2) can speak English understandable by 95% of native English speakers (meaning no one from either India or Alabama)

(3) actually understand the product.

 

If software should be introduced without tech support:

First offense: $1,000
Second offense: eight billion dollars
Third offense:  hanging

I’m serious.

 

 

 

 

 

The Cheapness Olympics

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published August 20, 2015] © 2015 

At a happy hour recently, we were having a contest about the cheapest person each of us had ever known. I actually entered three candidates. None of them won but they all got honorable mentions.

 

Fortunately, we’ve been surrounded by truly generous people for all of our lives which makes the pikers that much more memorable.

 

My first entry was a couple whom my former husband had known in college. He hadn’t had any contact with them in the 15 years since graduation when he got a call from them saying they were coming out to San Diego for two weeks and hoped to see us while they were here.  My then-husband enthusiastically agreed. A few days later another call: a mix-up about their accommodations had occurred.  Might they, and their toddler daughter, stay with us for the first two nights since their airline tickets were already purchased? OK, we said, but be forewarned that our house is not baby proofed. We had no kids of our own at the time.

 

They duly arrived but daily complications with their other accommodations kept arising. Vague excuses despite our specific queries as to where this housing was. Should be just one more night, they said. After a week, we started to get really suspicious.
 

They managed to be at our house every night for dinner noting that it was greatly preferable for a young child to eat at home rather than a restaurant. It became clear that short of changing the locks (we thought of it), we were not getting rid of them.

 

On their last evening, they arrived at dinner time bearing a gift “to thank us for our hospitality” (i.e. sponging off us for two weeks). It was a $10 cardboard-backed poster which they leaned up against the beautiful Tiffany hurricane lamp on our dining room table which promptly fell over and broke. Oops! No offer to replace it. Let’s stay in touch, they said when they left. We never heard from them again.

 

My second candidate was a woman I knew casually in college on the east coast who I ran into at a local alumni event. Our husbands seemed to hit it off so we ended up socializing with them. Both the woman and her husband had had their educations funded by the income from their trust funds and were each heirs to fortunes that would be familiar to you. But they liked to play “struggling young 20-somethings,” and while we fed them nice meals at our place, dinner at theirs generally consisted of bread pudding (no meat) as the main course with a salad, and for dessert, “frozen yogurt” – one container of Dannon per couple put into the freezer and served with two spoons.

 

You could see how these peoples’ ancestors had gotten rich. This couples’ favorite entertaining gambit was to invite their friends for a “bring your favorite wine and your favorite cheese” party – and then proceeded to put guests’ names on them to shame you into bringing a genuinely good wine and a genuinely pricey cheese. (It was alleged to engender conversation about one’s selections.) Suffice to say, they were able to stock their wine cabinet for months with the unopened bottles.

 

For my 30^th birthday, they showed up at our house with cake and a “gift basket” (minus the basket). The gifts were two avocados from their tree and a book from a local library sale still marked $.25, all wrapped in newspaper, along with the bottle of wine we’d brought to the wine and cheese party. The supermarket cake was tagged “Clearance” to reflect its imminent sell-by date and read “Feliz cumpleaños.”

 

My last candidate was a fellow mom with whom I’d had the misfortune to carpool for a sports practice. She frequently bailed on her carpool days leaving messages on my home answering machine (she had my work number) that she was unable to drive that day because her husband wanted her to meet him for drinks at their club. (Only in La Jolla.) So it probably wasn’t too surprising when she showed up to the end-of-the-season pot luck team party at my house minus anything resembling a pot but carrying a large Costco can of beans. She wanted to make her chili at my house, she said, so it would be “fresh.” (I think chili does better after it’s been in the fridge for a day.) She then proceeded to appropriate my stock pot and ransack my spice cabinet for all the spices she’d need, making a giant mess in my kitchen in the process. Nobody ate it (since other people had brought actual food) so she graciously announced she was leaving it for my family, since of course, she couldn’t actually take it with her without stealing my pot as well.
 

As I said, all honorable mentions. You don’t even want to know the story that won.



 

 



Letting It Go

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published August 13, 2015]  © 2015 

There was definitely a selection factor for the people who attended my 50^th high school reunion in suburban New York a few weeks ago.  We were the ones who weren’t dead.

I confess I was seriously ambivalent about attending this event. But in the end, I was glad I went, despite, as I’ve previously written, the nightmare air travel to get there. Fortunately, there was one shining light in the airline experience: flying from Martha’s Vineyard (where we were visiting friends ahead of time) to Armonk, NY (closest airport to my hometown) in an 8-seater Cape Air plane. When I tried to go through the TSA line at the Martha’s Vineyard airport, I was  informed that I didn’t need to as mine was a “TSA-unsecured flight.” There’s really such a thing?  But then, there’s probably only minimal terrorist activity going on between Martha’s Vineyard and Armonk.

When they announced my flight, the Cape Air agent told me to go out the side door, walk past the playground, and hang out by the chain link fence where someone would come get me and my two fellow passengers.  After hours being tortured at O’Hare en route, this was truly refreshing.

Olof, meanwhile, had decided that he would rather excise his spleen with a rusty cheese knife than go to my reunion (his own, in Walnut Creek, is in September) and decided that it would be an upper instead to tour the battlefields in Gettysburg. Fortunately for me, the huge storm that was about to hit the Northeast held off long enough for my tiny toy plane to fly. While a deluge didn’t particularly impact my reunion, Olof observed that the Gettysburg battlefields probably show better when not under water.

When I arrived at my Armonk motel (my Draconianally-zoned home town doesn’t have any hostelries), friends had already set up a bar as a precursor to our first evening plans, which was to eschew the reunion’s official Friday night event: walking in the graduation ceremonies followed by dinner at the school cafeteria. When I heard that my classmates had voted for this event, I could wonder: were they all on food stamps? Further, I thought this was a rotten thing to do to the new graduates: like, if they work hard their whole lives and don't die of cancer, WE'RE what they have to look forward to?  Third, I avoided that cafeteria like the plague in high school so flying across the country to eat there wasn’t really high on my list. As it was later disclosed, the vote for the graduation/cafeteria event was 12-10, the other 150 classmates having failed to vote one way or the other. 

The big event was the Saturday night “dinner dance” at the local country club whose heyday was in the 1940s. We had a DJ who played “our” music, including the much beloved YMCA which was technically released 13 years after we graduated but without which no oldies high school reunion would be complete.

Despite being a small town, we actually have one really famous classmate, a Pulitzer prize-winning humor columnist and author of some 20 books who has written about our high school frequently. In fact, his latest book has an entire chapter about his yearbook photo in which he describes his hair as resembling a “malnourished weasel.” He and his wife came to the dinner dance with their 15-year-old daughter who bore up bravely but could be seen clicking away on her phone. I would have killed to see the hashtags: #geezerfest  #worstnightofmylife  #sincewhenisthismusic  #Illneverbebadagain #oyveyYMCA?

All of us being 67-68, there was, not surprisingly, a lot of health and diet talk. One of my classmates appeared to have been dropped into a vat of new age elixir: everything was “meant to be,” all choices were OK. You just wanted to smack her. But what was truly lovely was how unfiltered conversations were. Maybe it’s because we’ve finally dropped all the pretenses. Or maybe we’re borderline senile. Regardless, the dialog was all refreshingly honest. Then again, maybe in high school you don’t want conversations to be that honest.

It being a reunion, there were prizes:  most marriages (6); most grandchildren (8), longest marriage (46 years). As with the 40^th, I got the award for coming the farthest although not before a challenge by somebody from Washington state was settled by MapQuest on our iPhones.

Alas not present: the alphabetical creepo who sat next to me in homeroom. I was secretary of the Organ Club (music, not donors) so when club announcements were read, he loved lean in and leer, “Hey, Inga, want to play MY organ?”  I had so many rejoinders ready.  Dang.

 

Ultimately I think the theme song for a 50^th reunion ought to come from a much newer hit, Frozen’s “Let it go.”  I’m happy to say, I think we did.

Arriving in my tiny toy plane