Status: Acting Crumongionly: And Here’s Why

I’m utterly annoyed by Modern Times! I’m trying to set up my wife’s new phone for her. Set up should be trivial — everything on her old phone was left at its default setting. But because her previous phone was a 3G device, the old cellphone is now bricked.

I need her new phone to sign her up for United Health-Care’s new Well at Home benefit. Signup requires 2-part verification with a code they send to her phone. But the moment I open her new phone, it goes into Google’s process to transfer settings from her old one, which no longer works.

I thought I could simply tell the great Google to skip each setup option, but I hit a password challenge trying that. I tried the password for her phone. No dice. Her GMail password was equally useless, as was the one for United Health Care. We haven’t yet set a password for Well at Home. What fucking password could they want? I have hundreds of passwords. Perish the thought their online form might give me a hint.

I could just call UHC’s new program, but their Well at Home group doesn’t seem to have a phone number. Even if I could find one, it would leave me talking to a dumb robot with no entry for what I want to do and no option that connects me to a human being, even an offshore one whose accent is so atrocious I have no idea what they are saying.

Oh, and a boink just called during this setup fiasco. A “boink” is my term for those infuriating telemarketing calls that use auto-dialers to connect. Answer, and you hear a “boink” connecting you with the next chump available in their boiler-room.

The whole mess puts me in mind of “To Morrow,” the famous Kingston Trio song from the late 1950s. Life was complicated 60 years ago, but don’t worry, it’s gotten much worse!