Asleep at the Switch
[Unpublished: Submitted in 2008 As Part of Application To Become a
Knoxville News Sentinel Community Columnist]
In 2006, my mother-in-law and my husband both died and I had to sort out their estates. One day, I received a package from an insurance company, including a cover letter with information about my mother-in-law, including her full name, date of birth, etc. But behind the letter to me was another letter addressed to another person, giving personal information about another dead person. Obviously, whoever prepared and sent the package mistakenly included the second letter.
I don’t know if the personal information was enough for an unscrupulous unintended recipient to steal the dead person’s identity, but I was alarmed. I sent the second letter back to the company and also informed them about it by phone. I pointed out that if I had deep-sixed the letter, the intended recipient might have waited for months for it and then been told by the company that it must have been “lost in the mail”. Well, so it had, but not because of postal service error.
I was stunned a few weeks later to find yet another mis-sent letter sent to me in the same way — but by a different company. What are the odds that workers at two different companies would be so careless as to send one person (me) letters addressed to and regarding other people? It boggles the mind….unless it is a frequent occurrence.
I have concluded that it is a frequent occurrence. I think that the low-paid envelope stuffers who sent out these mailings are “asleep at the switch”, bored with their jobs and letting their attention wander. I suspect that there is no real quality control over these mailings, e.g., I would bet that any checking of these envelopes by supervisors is seldom done and then only on a random, one-sample basis. I also doubt that my report to these companies of the mis-sent letters made it into any phone or mail log, staff briefing, or training class. Thus this sort of thing keeps happening.
I have also received a mailing addressed to me, but with somebody else’s personal medical information inside. I called the medical practice that had sent it, pointing out that they could be sued for failure to safeguard the information. They made the correct noises of concern, but I was not convinced they would do anything more than send the mailing out again.
I am similarly uneasy about some service people. The installers of my new furnace failed to put in the humidifier and their boss failed to check that it had been installed; if I hadn’t asked, I would have paid for it and not gotten it. The installer of my new washing machine misrouted the hoses; I found that a load of my underwear had been rinsed in hot water, not cold. Four days later, the installer who corrected it told me that the first installer had been making this mistake a lot. An insurance agent failed to cancel a policy as he said he would; months later, a collection agency started calling me. Then my new insurance rep had to send the old insurance company my new policy information three times before they acknowledged receipt — even though it was E-mailed and faxed as specified.
I have put in a lot of extra time, effort, and expense to get these errors corrected. But the real worry is that my identity may be stolen because my personal information was not safeguarded or that, e.g., my house might burn down because of a bad installation. The people who are asleep at the switch mean no harm, but they cause trouble all the same.
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Favorite Sayings and Expressions
[Unpublished: Submitted in 2008 As Part of Application To Become a
Knoxville News Sentinel Community Columnist]
My late husband had a favorite saying about people’s screwing up: “Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity”. This was supposed to be a corollary of the famous “Occam’s Razor”, the philosophical statement that in trying to explain a situation or phenomenon one should make only as many assumptions as necessary and no more. The older I get, the more sense this makes: the simplest explanation is usually the right one and if, e.g., a payment is not posted when it should have been, it will turn out that some poor minimum-wage data entry person was asleep at the switch.
My grandfather and father-in-law were railroad men, so the expression “asleep at the switch” really hits a resonance with me. “Hits a resonance” is from my physics courses; no other expression I can think of has that same “je ne sais quoi”. And by the way, how ’bout those Frenchies? They sure gave us a lot of good expressions, non? Like many people who studied Spanish, I use Spanish expressions a lot. My husband and I would say, “Hablando del rey de Roma….” It’s even more fun if the expression is actually Spanglish, from my brother’s “I’ll take-o a taco” to my Hispanic friend’s “I’ll park-o el carro”. And “leave us not forget” the wealth of funny/wry British expressions, such as the inimitable “Bob’s your uncle”.
Having pets or small children creates opportunities for personalized sayings and expressions. Years ago, my newborn son, wrapped tight by the hospital personnel, was a “baby burrito” and a “child chimichanga”. My long-haired black cat has, in the best Southern tradition, “big fur”; yes, he is furfurriffic, magnifurcent, and downright furrilicious. My female cat likes to pose in what for a human would be come-hither positions, e.g., a leg draped provocatively over her perch as she reclines; she is a sure bet for the “Fur Babes” calendar shoot. On the other hand, seeing the damage deer do to my garden and having had one hit my car on two occasions, I now call them “dumb damned deer”.
In times of stress, one needs colorful expressions to blow off steam. An old officemate of mine frequently muttered to himself near the end of the workday, “Give a s___, give a s____”, simultaneously expressing indifference and exhorting himself to put forth just a little more effort. (He had other expressions unique to him, but they are too earthy for a family newspaper.) I myself had an extremely stressful crise de conscience some years ago, as a result of which I “fell on my sword”. So I changed my personal motto from “What does not destroy me will make me strong” to “Audacity, again audacity, and forever audacity”. I then went to work for a boss who abused his underlings; what a comfort it was to think “What goes around comes around”. As I left for the field one day, a young coworker cried, “Take me with you!”, a cri de coeur because all the boss’s venom would be concentrated on him if I left him behind. Ironically, the same words came into my mind on the last day of my husband’s life, as he lay dying.
One of my all-time favorite sayings is from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” (underlining mine), so appropriate when one is trying to understand why bureaucrats do as they do. Finally, there is that direction on musical scores, “attaca”, meaning to go right on to the next section without hesitation or pause. Strikes me as a useful guide to tackling the to-do list.
Why I Watch “Project Runway”
[Unpublished: Submitted in 2008 As Part of Application To Become a
Knoxville News Sentinel Community Columnist]
My friends can testify that I am no fashionista: my style is best described as “appropriate for the occasion” and I haven’t used makeup for at least 25 years. So I am the last person anybody would expect to watch “Project Runway”. Yet I do, and here’s why.
I like to walk through all kinds of gardens; I like to look at pictures and statues in museums; I like to examine knitting stitches for their topology; I like to…. Well, you get the idea: I like to look at color and form. I also like to see the processes by which things are accomplished. E.g., I like to watch television programs and read books about crime: the reasoning of the real or faux detectives in tracking down leads, the probing of witnesses, the “dance” between perp and interrogator, and the techniques of forensics, all to sort out the true and real and discard the false and irrelevant.
“Project Runway” is ostensibly a show about fashion, but in a larger sense, it is a show about aesthetic evaluation and exploration, about how people work together and against each other on difficult problems, and about evaluation of people’s efforts at problem solving. For people who themselves like to make things, it can be riveting. The psychology of the creative process is demonstrated on this show as perhaps on no other; for example, I find “American Idol” frustrating because there is so little time spent in actual song and because we don’t see the contestants rehearsing and working up their presentations.
I would never have watched “Project Runway” except that during Season Three a houseguest wanted to watch it. I was hooked from that first episode. Initially, the most interesting thing was the way contestants made their choices: a roll of fabric caught his eye in the fabric store so he picked that color, she wanted to show her fun side instead of the high couture style the judges had come to expect from her and so decided to make a flirty dress, he underbought fabric and so had to recast his design. The technical problems were interesting to me, as an engineer. Further episodes showed the bonding — and the backbiting and backstabbing — that comes from living and working together.
That some reality or contest-type shows are completely fake is evident; “Survivor” and “Big Brother” are shows for voyeurs and are no different fundamentally from professional wrestling. “Project Runway”, despite the artificial nature of some of its challenges, is realistic because actual work is being done. There is a meaningful prize at the end: the winner and probably also the several top runners-up may have their careers kicked to a far higher level. And although the judges may be influenced by viewer preferences, it seems clear that they really do make their decisions on the basis of their experience and aesthetic taste and that they alone decide the winner each week, not the audience (as in “American Idol”). Even so, the most interesting and rewarding aspect of “Project Runway” is that the viewer himself can make an informed decision as to what is the best effort (unlike “Top Chef”, where, alas, the viewer can’t himself taste the dishes).
Heidi Klum has shown the world how such a show should be organized, with its minimum of fluff and chitchat, its interesting cast of judges and contestants, its intelligent structure, its excellent photography, and above all, its smart editing and pacing.
I may not be interested in fashion per se, but as meaningful and even intellectual entertainment, “Project Runway” fits the bill for me.
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An Autumn Remembrance
[Published in the Knoxville News Sentinel, November 23 and 30, 2008]
When I was young, autumn seemed a melancholy time, mainly because after the excitement of going back to school had worn off, there was the daily drag of getting up early for school and toiling over homework. After I had finished graduate school and had a home and garden, autumn meant the sad end of the growing season, with the flowers banished by the frosts. Now in my middle age, autumn is a time of loss and reminiscence, because the love of my life died in the fall of 2006.
There is a beautiful song called “Allerseelen” that we in the Oak Ridge Community Band have played. It is by Richard Strauss (lyrics by Rosenegg) and is based on an old religious superstition that the souls of the dead may come back for one night a year: All Souls’ Day, November 2. In the song, the singer yearns to be with his dead beloved again, if only on that one autumn night. Besides the heartfelt wish to see a soulmate once more, the song has resonance for me because each verse ends “as once in May” — and my beloved and I were married in the month of May.
I feel that I was one of the big winners in the Lottery of Love. A good man chose me — me! — and loved me from almost the moment we met until the day he died 34 years later. Whatever else happens in my life, they can’t take that away from me. It was gratifying to hear people say after he died that it was obvious how much my husband loved me, but it was not news to me. He “had my back”; he looked out for me as if I were the most precious thing he had. I had polio as a tot and was left with a permanent limp; it didn’t matter to him. I went through a couple of major life crises; he was a brick, supportive and loyal. He was one in a million.
Soon after my husband died, the Oak Ridge Community Band played a medley of themes from “La Boheme”, that uber-romantic/tragic opera. The final theme is almost unparalleled in music for its touching grief. On that piece, I played the piccolo, a poignant little voice crying above all the rest, and I could hardly see to play through my tears. But the lovers in La Boheme were young and their love was new. So the loss was sad for the survivor, but surely not the same as for a older person like me. That is, when two people have been married for a long time, it is as though their roots and branches are deeply entwined, so that when one of the pair dies, it takes a long time for the survivor to fill in the gaps (if indeed it can be done). Nobody seems to have written an opera about Baucis and Philemon, that long-married and devoted pair from Greek mythology, but maybe somebody should. I would go see it.
Another song the Oak Ridge Community Band has played is “I’ll Be Seeing You”, a World War II favorite. It ends “I’ll be looking at the moon — but I’ll be seeing you”. You younger readers may think, “Oh, that’s so sad”. Well, it is, it is. But older readers can, I think, appreciate the fact that remembering can also be comforting. Now, in autumn, I look at the big bright harvest moon and think of my Jim — and just for a moment, it is May again.
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The Devil We Know or the One We Don’t Know?
[Published in the Knoxville News Sentinel, September 27, 2009]
Whatever the arguments against government-run health care, what may finally put it over the top is that even people with insurance are fed up with the existing bureaucracies: the medical “systems”, insurance companies, and plans (SIPs).
There are mysterious denials of legitimate claims that in the past were not questioned. My most recent one had to do with a molar my dentist had been watching for several years. When signs of cracking appeared, he said it needed a crown. First he sent me to a periodontist for a gum procedure, which the periodontist agreed was necessary. But after the procedure, the insurance company refused to pay for it, saying it was unnecessary.
My dentist was indignant. As his person told me, they don’t seek preapproval by the insurance company for normal procedures because that can take months, during which time the tooth may fracture — bye, bye, tooth.
My dentist is trying to get the decision reversed; his office sent the insurance company a letter by registered mail (and warned me that the insurance company has sometimes denied receiving documents sent by registered mail). Meanwhile I may have to pay $736 for the gum procedure (after the patient’s portion of $129 I already paid).
The billing practices of the medical “systems” (e.g., the big hospital facilities) and insurance companies are bewildering. In May I had my annual breast ultrasound (in addition to a mammogram). I don’t remember ever having to pay for it in the past, but this year I paid $299 of it as my annual deductible. After the ultrasound, it was recommended that I have two breast cysts aspirated, as I had had done several times over the past 20 years. This time, however, I had to pay for part of the procedure, whose nominal cost the insurance company listed as $3000(!).
The breast facility is owned by a hospital “system”. So there were charges from both the breast facility, where the ultrasound and aspirations were done, and the parent hospital. The doctor’s charges — $325 for the first aspiration and $175 for the second — appropriately reflected the fact that there was only one setup and recordkeeping effort for the single operation (doing two aspirations at the same time should not cost twice what doing just one would). But there was a double charge for the ultrasound imaging during the aspiration, even though the ultrasound was set up only the once.
I was puzzled by two charges of $814, one for each puncture, constituting more than half of the total charge for the procedure. A hospital billing person said these were “facility charges” to compensate the hospital “for having the [breast] facility”. Anybody else would call this overhead.
The hospital has a contract with the insurance company under which the insurance company pays far less than the nominal cost. So the actual cost was $1040, of which I had to pay $230 (a $150 copayment plus 10% of the hospital’s charges) although I had already satisfied my deductible — on top of the $2300 a year I pay for my medical plan.
And don’t even get me started on how I overpaid my medical plan $2000 in error and they refused to refund it, even though they retroactively canceled any coverage under it. My lawyer laughed at their explanation, but said that while I would most likely win if I sued, the legal costs would be more than $2000. It would be, he said, only a moral victory. So I ate the $2000.
Most people like their own doctors and dentists — I do — but few feel positive about the SIPs, for obvious reasons. So you have to wonder: would a government-run bureaucracy really be any worse than the SIP bureaucracies?
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A Case Study in Mother Love
[Published by the Knoxville News Sentinel, May 12, 2013]
My neighbor’s three grandchildren come to her house for piano lessons or basketball in the driveway. They are all cute, but it is the oldest one who holds my attention the most.
During her birth, she had to be dragged into the world by vacuum extraction, during which nerves in her shoulder were damaged (a brachial plexus injury). At five months old, in her mother’s arms, she was a beautiful baby with big eyes — and a left arm that hung limply at her side. Doctors here were pessimistic about treatment; it appeared that she would have an essentially paralyzed arm for the rest of her life.
Her parents and grandparents refused to accept that. Her mother and grandmother trolled the Internet and found a Texas medical group that had had success treating her condition. She had two operations, after one of which her arm was splinted perpendicularly out from her side for weeks. All her family helped, but it was her mother who bore the brunt of doing her exercises and taking her to therapy.
At three or four, she was being pulled in her little red wagon. Her grandmother directed her to hold on — and I was thrilled to see both little arms arms go up and both little hands clutch the sides.
Today she is a pretty, outgoing girl of eleven, an A student who plays the piano and the clarinet (like her grandmother and aunt) and enjoys playing basketball and softball. Her left arm is weak, but it works. Her grandmother says that that arm is shorter than the right, but I rejoice to say that I have never noticed it. The love and devotion of her parents and grandparents — but most of all her mother — have given her opportunities she would otherwise not have had.
Her story resonates with me because I too had a mother like that. At age 2-1/2 I was stricken with polio. My mother had formerly been a nurse at a hospital that treated polio patients, so when I fell over and could not stand up she immediately realized what was wrong with me. I have often thought how terrible that first night was for her: besides the threat to me, there was the possibility that my sister and brother might also be stricken or that she herself might fall ill and not be able to care for us.
Fortunately only I was affected. My main therapy lasted for about two years. My mother made time to do extensive daily stretching and strengthening exercises with me while taking care of three little children by herself when my salesman father was away. Later there were an ankle operation and many visits to the orthopedic clinic, an hour and a half away by bus. After the next of her five chidren was born, my mother had to go back to work as a nurse, juggling her job with caring for all of us. Thanks to her, my legs are weak, but they work.
She always encouraged me, saying, “You can be anything you want to be.” She once told me about a boy who was in rehab with me. There was anger in her voice as she spoke of his mother, who had not kept up with his exercises; partly because of that, he was left with one leg several inches shorter than the other.
I had always told her frequently that I loved her. But several years before her death, when she was at a low point and we thought she was dying, I told her how grateful I was to her for her sacrifices and her efforts and how inspiring her example was to me. Upon hearing that, she cried.
So today, when I see that confident, cheerful girl skipping off the school bus and up her grandmother’s driveway next door, I feel a resonance. Although her parents would have loved her however she turned out, she, like me, had the kind of mother who went the extra mile to help her be all that she could be. She is to me a living symbol of what a mother’s love can accomplish.
Fittingly, her parents named her Grace.
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A Sisyphean Trip for a Disabled Person
[Published after 2 December 2013 in the Knoxville News Sentinel]
I am in the twilight zone of disability: no wheelchair (yet), but having difficulty with stairs and walking long distances. I seldom use my handicap placard, challenging myself to traverse parking lots. However, I do use it if I might otherwise have to walk a long distance — e.g., recently when I attended The Eagles concert at UT’s Thompson-Boling Arena (TBA).
The friend who bought our tickets had called TBA weeks earlier about parking, emphasizing the need for a handicapped space. He was assured that we just needed to show my placard and we would be able to park in Lot G-10.
With another couple, we left Parkwest Medical Center at 7:00 for the 8:00 concert, allowing a 30-minute traffic cushion. There was a heavier-than-expected backup out Neyland Drive for this popular concert, but we should have been only 20 minutes late. However, when we arrived, Lot G-10 was full and we were waved away.
I was afraid we would forfeit our tickets if we couldn’t get there. Some concertgoers parked many blocks away and walked, but that was not an option for me. Having noticed shuttle buses running from the Ag[riculture] Campus, we went there.
The Ag lot turn-in was hard to find, as were the ticket people clustered in the far corner of the lot. With my placard, the shuttle was free, but there were no handicapped spaces near the shuttle stop, which was across the lot and down a dark broken-tile path. The shuttle dropoff was not close to the TBA doors; with no signs or workers to direct us, we had to search for the entrance. We finally entered TBA at 8:55 during “The Best of My Love”, having missed about 40 minutes of the concert.
My friend pointed out my physical difficulties to the door people, but they just waved us along. We started around the wrong way but eventually found the stairs to our section.
The railing ran down the middle of the stairs, with frequent gaps. I had to grip the railing tightly as I, exhausted already, slowly descended, with no support over the gaps. My friend could not help because there was room for only one person on each side of the railing. Our seats were near the floor level; perhaps there was an elevator we could have taken to the floor, but nobody indicated it to us.
During an encore, we left so as not to hold up others. I pulled myself step by painful step up the stairs faster than my friend thought possible (he couldn’t see me helping my weak leg with my free hand). But it cost me: I was very shaky and feared I would fall as we walked to the shuttle stop. We rode back and walked along the dark path and through the lot.
My friend was incensed by the lack of help, by my having had to struggle, and by the futility of his due diligence call to TBA. He sent the TBA manager a complaint. The manager’s reply contained no apology or even regret for miscommunication; he merely thanked my friend for the “comments.” But he did make one admission: the handicapped parking ran out because the concert audience skewed older and TBA had not allowed for that. (He didn’t mention that Lot G-10 is also a “Premium Prepaid” lot and so handicapped parking might have been underallocated anyway.)
TBA management is happy to take its portion of physically impaired people’s tickets, but seems to feel no responsibility to provide parking for them, even though the shuttle is a problematic option for many. I made it, just barely, but what would a person in a wheelchair have done?
It was humiliating to have to drag myself up and down the stairs in front of hundreds of other people. It was hard to have to tell my friend that I needed to stop and rest because my legs were shaky (and we would have to wait for the next shuttle). It was embarrassing to have to delay the other couple’s return home by my slowness.
Thanks, Eagles, for a great concert — what I heard of it. But if you ever come back to TBA again, I won’t be there to hear you. For me, never again.
I Can’t Talk With My Siblings
[Published after August 18, 2013, in the Knoxville News Sentinel]
I can’t talk with my siblings about politics. A friend suggests that this is a metaphor for America. Well, maybe.
Raised in the same house in the same small Arizona town, we five are much alike: we are outspoken (okay, opinionated), have a strong sense of right and wrong, and get upset when a law or promise is violated.
But we have different views on political issues. My siblings are all dedicated liberals who think George W. Bush is practically a criminal. Me, I get exasperated at both the Republican and Democratic parties, my attitude being “a pox on both your houses.” I identify with many libertarian positions, but consider myself eclectic. My siblings think the government should take care of people in a big way; I, having had polio and fought to be independent, highly value self-reliance.
We have had different life trajectories. My divorced eldest sister, who still lives in Arizona, dropped out of college to have children. But she has read a gazillion books on all subjects, even philosophy. She used to tell funny stories, but now, afflicted with fibromyalgia and bipolar disorder, she is just plain mean. She is a poster child for the difficulties of dealing with the government regarding disabilities and health care costs.
After college in California, a semester in Costa Rica, and graduate school in Indiana, I started work in Chicago as a radiological engineer in the nuclear power field. Later I worked at ORNL, at UT, on a radiation compensation project, and at Pellissippi State.
My younger brother, the only childless one, is a retired respiratory therapist. A cultured person who loves art and organ music, he has lived in Germany for 25 years. He is knowledgeable about health care and end-of-life issues, both from European and American points of view.
My next younger sister is a law office manager married to a newspaper editor. She traveled to Asia and Europe, has lived across the US, and now resides in Minnesota. She knows about the nationwide employment situation from decades of working in temp agencies, nonprofit job training organizations, and human resources departments.
My youngest sister is a housewife married to a hotshot computer science professor. After various genteel part-time jobs, she eventually became a Seattle school activist whose co-blog is nationally read. She campaigns against charter schools. Her dogged attention to detail made her our majority choice to be our late mother’s personal representative.
Despite our different paths, the other four have arrived at nearly the same place politically, but it is often not the place where I am. Reasonable people can disagree, but it is hard to be in the minority and I often feel defensive.
As a child I was socially awkward and not “street smart” like my siblings. My mother laughingly commented one day that I had no common sense. Thereafter that was my role in the family: the one who did best in school, but had no understanding of the real world. I overcame my ignorance, but my sibs still see me that way. They are all very anti-nuclear, so despite my long experience in the nuclear field, they used to smile pityingly at me when I tried to talk about the issues. They said they appreciated that I knew a lot, but they saw me as prejudiced, deeming more credible the “experts” they listened to.
Today I grumble to myself, “But which one of us is a longtime subscriber to The American Spectator, The New Republic, and REASON?” (Conservative, liberal, and libertarian rags respectively.) That is irrelevant to them — they still think me misguided.
While we can’t really discuss many issues, we do listen to what the others say. I do my homework on an issue, but I am also interested to hear what they think. After all, they are good people who care about others, are not moored in their own narrow interests, and truly want world peace. So if they have reached a conclusion, I must consider how they got there even if I finally have to disagree.
So much in common, so much not, but still listening: maybe that is indeed a metaphor for our national life — and our national “family”.
Dumb Damn Deer
[Published in the Knoxville News Sentinel after January 6, 2014]
Tennessee gardeners contend with all sorts of problems. Powdery mildew and leaf spot, Japanese beetles and squash borers, groundhogs and rabbits — we battle just about everything with our sprays and traps, mostly successfully. Except for deer.
Or as I call them, the Dumb Damn Deer. More destructive than groundhogs and rabbits, they chow down on my lily buds just at the point of bloom and heedlessly stomp my marigolds into the ground.
An effective cheap deterrent is my homemade pepper spray — deer hate spicy buds. (A good reason to grow cayennes, people!) But it has to dry completely and eventually rain washes it off. In a wet year I can’t keep up and so lose half my lilies to these hoofed vermin.
Deer are scary up close. I shout at them and chase them, but of course they easily outrun me. They don’t flee with any particular alarm, viewing me as a mere annoyance. Once when I was waving my arms and walking toward a deer, it started to run at me. I backed off a step at first, but then said, “Hell, no,” and stood my ground, waving my arms and yelling. It then ran away, but in a bored fashion.
I wish that the trapper I occasionally use for other pests would trap and haul them away. But he can’t, he tells me: the law permits it for nearly all pests except deer. Shooting them is against the law except in hunting season and then only outside city limits. Similarly, nobody is allowed to fire off arrows at them.
I daydream about scaring them off like my next-door neighbor, whose garden is next to mine. A former Louisiana farm boy, he is good with a slingshot. Once, from his second-floor window, he spotted a deer in my backyard and managed to get off a shot that hit it in the rump. It ran for the hills, but deer have short memories. Recently I acquired an infrared wildlife camera for another purpose, but I could use it for spotting deer. Knowing what time of night they arrive, I could set my alarm and lie in wait to….do what?
But seriously, there is a far bigger deer issue than the garden and the insolence. Deer are incompatible with life in an urban area. They are dangerous to motorists. The more deer that are allowed to live comfortably in towns, the worse it will get.
I myself have hit two deer while driving. Both times were at night within an hour after sunset, once on I-95 and once on Bethel Valley Road. The first time was terrifying: the collision caused the deer’s body to roll onto my hood and partway up my windshield before sliding off the passenger side. Fortunately, the windshield did not break. With deer poop all over the hood, I did not have to prove my case to the police and the insurance company. The second time, the deer hit my front tire, bent the axle, and knocked the car sideways. Again, there was proof: in the collision the wheel rim, momentarily pushed away from the tire, caught a neat fringe of deer hair around 40% of its circumference.
People don’t die from deer collisions very often, but the potential is well demonstrated.
Just two months ago a woman died in Jefferson County when a deer smashed through her windshield and out the rear window, causing her car to hit a tree. She was only 18 years old.
What makes the Dumb Damn Deer such privileged characters, allowed to threaten us citizens with impunity in and around our own towns? State authorities say, in effect, “There is nothing we can do.” Oh, yes, there is: they could establish a controlled trapping or killing program, with special hunters hand-picked and paid for by the state, to eliminate deer from towns and close-in areas. This might not help those who, like the young woman, are way out on county roads, but it would reduce the risk to many.
So many people are sentimental about deer, but that is foolish. If the time ever comes to push back the invading deer, our forces should be armed with more than slingshots.
My Type of Person
[Published in the Knoxville News Sentinel after February 17, 2014]
Last year, after almost seven years of widowhood, I started seeing someone.
I had met him long ago when we worked on a DOE project. We liked each other as people but were not romantically interested because we were married to others. When the project ended, we did not see each another again for more than 15 years.
Now retired, he still keeps up with DOE affairs. Skeptical about a story concerning a giant waste of public money on a DOE project, he spoke to a News Sentinel reporter, who wrote an article on his views. I too had rolled my eyes at that highly spun “oops” story and was pleased that my old colleague had shone some light on it. As further technical reinforcement, I wrote a supporting letter to the News Sentinel editor. My colleague read it and called me up. We talked for an hour and a half, covering not only the project but our lives since we last spoke. That was the start of our relationship. So one could say that we reconnected via the pages of this very newspaper. (Thanks, News Sentinel!)
I was devastated when my husband died and over the years my life had grown narrower and colder. Somehow my new beau managed to wake me up emotionally. After we started dating, I realized that the only other overture I had received over my years alone was a very creepy proposition from a former coworker, a man I thought I knew. I shuddered as I remembered that person and thought, “He is so not my type.”
Then I wondered: what is my type? I considered my late husband, mentally listing the top qualities that had attracted me. He was intelligent; he was a good man and a straight shooter; he was his own man and thought for himself; he had a sense of humor; and he respected women and the weak and elderly. Then I considered my new beau. He too has all these qualities. Oh, so that’s my type, I thought.
But then I began to wonder about other people in my life – men and women – that I had not only liked but admired and felt connected to very strongly, not just as casual friends but as people whose fates I would always want to know even when we lost contact and as people I would think of again and again even after they were dead. (RIP, Susan Arnold Kaplan.) I realized that all of them had these qualities as well. In particular, these were qualities I used to admire in my late mother and (except for intelligence) the opposite of qualities that I deplored in my feckless alcoholic father. This realization popped my eyes open: I didn’t have just a male romantic type, but a people type. It seemed to be not so much an attraction based on shared interests or physical attributes as….well, an affinity of souls.
Ever curious, I began to wonder whether it is like this for other people. When I was in graduate school, we physics students used to say that something we found to be especially interesting or meaningful “hit a resonance.” Having found a subset of my friends and relatives that hit a resonance with me, I wonder if others have experienced this as well. A person may have a large circle of friends, but does he have a subset that he considers to be special? E.g., of his four close friends from high school, why did he pick one to be his best man even though that one was not his main drinking buddy or fave E-mail correspondent – was it because of a special connection he felt to that one above mere friendship? Does another person regard some people in her life as superior in a spiritual sense because they seem to strike an answering chord of inspiration in her? Readers, feel free to write and let me know how it is with you.
My beau – one of my “resonators” — and I recently became engaged. He is nothing like my late husband in looks, but strongly resembles him in character, solid and caring. As with my late husband, he was simpatico with me from the start. I.e., just my type.
Why Bad Things Happen to Good People
[Published in the Knoxville News Sentinel after March 24, 2014]
Graduation speakers giving the usual boring “the secret to success” speeches miss an opportunity to discuss moral issues associated with the human condition — such as bad things happening to good people. Here is my take on that.
In general, the world is consequential: if you screw up, you suffer the consequences. If you don’t pay your electric bill, your electricity will be cut off; if you drive drunk, your car may get wrapped around a tree. Acting responsibly is supposed to result in a good life.
But virtue is not always rewarded. Natural disasters like tornados may cut off your electricity faster than the electric company; even if you are a teetotaler you could be the one killed when the drunk driver slams into your car. What did you ever do to deserve that?
Well, nothing. Natural disasters strike randomly. An adverse event occasioned by the misbehavior of one person is for that person not random and he can be blamed for his own misfortune, but for the victim of his actions, the catastrophe is entirely random because the victim did nothing to make it happen.
Randomness means that something occurs with no definite aim or pattern; while the probability of occurrence for the entire population may be known and thus the number of people affected may be predictable, the actual identity of those affected is not predictable. These poor people just happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
If there were only consequentialness, then people who lived responsibly and uprightly might get complacent and smug, thinking that “of course” nothing bad would ever happen to them because they were right-thinking and virtuous. That attitude might make them disinclined to help those to whom bad things did happen: they would view those unfortunates as having done wrong things and so brought their misfortunes on themselves.
With randomness, however, there is a stimulus to kind behavior. Those who suffer misfortunes, especially tragedies, feel that if there is no meaning or benefit to be taken out of their suffering, then they have suffered for nothing; this feeling is countered by the caring support of others. People who have some empathy for others find it reinforced when they are moved to comfort and help directly both the blameless and the non-blameless. Trying to make things better for someone else, overcoming the natural desire to avoid unpleasantness and effort, fortifies people’s characters. With parental encouragement, this evolution could start at a young age, e.g., helping serve the poor a Thanksgiving dinner.
Randomness is also a stimulus to constructive and corrective behavior. Compassionate people set up mechanisms for amelioration and progress: donating to the Red Cross and the Salvation Army, setting up scholarships, building houses for the poor. Scientists study weather events to predict them more reliably, engineers develop stronger materials for building cars and bridges, psychiatrists try to identify future perps and intervene early. Expressions of outrage by compassionate people at egregious abuse, exploitation, or neglect of others can spur protective action.
True, when reading of 50,000 people dying in a typhoon in far-off India, we could just turn the page: there is nothing we can do directly and our donations may be wasted. But people who start to donate money and time tend to continue to do so over a wider field, often moved to contribute internationally as well as locally. People who inspire others to donate create in them a feeling of being part not just of a family and circle of friends but of a larger group: “my town, my Tennessee, my America, my world”. This makes for a stronger and more cohesive society.
Nobody knows why the universe is set up as it is – why there is this mix of the consequential and the random, why bad things happen to good people. But while consequentialness provides us a blueprint as to best practices and our best shot at a good personal outcome, randomness pushes us to explore new ways to prevent and alleviate suffering and thus strengthen our characters, personal and civic. Whether you believe in God or not, the best approach to randomness, if you really want to make a difference in the world, is to let it be a stimulus to compassionate and constructive action.
Concierge Medicine
[Published in the Knoxville News Sentinel after June 6, 2016]
My husband got a letter recently from his family physician: Doctor X was inviting him to join a new club, which she called a “personalized healthcare practice”. Her stated objective is to reduce her practice to 400 patients, to be able to give more time and attention to each patient.
The annual “dues” are $1650, payable not to the doctor directly but to a “management group”, whose Doctor X brochure and info sheet use the term “concierge medicine” (CM) for the new practice. Patients join the club by signing a membership agreement with this group. The agreement warns, however, that the doctor does not work for the CM group and they are not responsible for the doctor’s performance or any medical services. So this intermediary group is just a billing/enrollment agent.
Club members will still be covered by their own insurance plans; they still have to pay their premiums, deductibles, copayments, etc. Thus the $1650 goes only toward enhanced access to Doctor X. She will have a cell phone by which she can be reached by direct phone call or E-mail from club members and she will return calls or E-mail by the next day. There will be favorable appointment times for members (next-day appointments, no long waits in the waiting room). The info sheet suggests that even house calls might be possible.
Patients who choose not to join the club will still be seen – but by her nurse practitioner, not by Doctor X herself. Presumably the nurse practitioner would refer problems she could not handle to Doctor X, but that is not stated. Doctor X’ s letter says that she is making the change in order to provide “unprecedented access” to her, but clearly it is not a question of degree of access but of access to her at all.
Per the Internet, there are three types of personalized/concierge/fee-based doctor practices. The first dispenses with insurance altogether; this often works well for patients who have no medical insurance or are poor but can pay a small periodic flat subscription fee. The second keeps only catastrophic insurance, with the added fee covering routine care. In both these cases, the patient has to cover hospital expenses, MRIs, etc., separately. The third is the Doctor X model, with insurance as usual but with the fee added to limit practice size. Some have termed this “spa medicine”, where members are generally the more well-to-do. The advantage to the doctor is working shorter hours for perhaps the same income.
One wonders if insurance companies believe that Doctor X’s two-tier plan meets their terms of coverage. They may not care, if they end up being charged less because they are paying for a nurse practitioner’s time instead of the doctor’s. But patients whose insurance plans imply access to a doctor may object to seeing only a nurse practitioner in all but exceptional circumstances. Also, it is arguable that eliminating part of the spectrum of practice from the doctor’s purview – the poorer and possibly sicker segment – reduces the doctor’s experience base and may limit his ability to distinguish the normal from the abnormal. The brochure states that “It was our mission to create an affordable, accessible, highest quality health care practice…..and to build on your relationship with your doctor – and we’ve succeeded.” I.e., they are declaring victory before the battle has started. Well, my husband decided not to join Doctor X’s club and found a new doctor – who chuckled at Doctor X’s plan and opined that it will not be popular in this area. So it will be interesting to see if this “ClubMed” practice succeeds.
