So, today I began a grand adventure to Atlanta, my first-ever professional business trip. I was admittedly kind of surprised when my boss told me, three weeks after starting my new job, that I would be flying down for more training. I'm even more surprised that he's going to be sending me out to Denver some time in "second quarter"—between April and August—to help out at the other distribution center I'm supporting. However, I love to travel, and I'm not going to look a gift-trip in the... um... exhaust.

I do wish Jessie could have come with me, but of course the company only paid for me to go. I probably could've arranged to bring her with me, and paid the difference, but I'm still a little too new to that whole earning-money thing, and I'd rather not spend what I've got so quickly. I had to buy a mobile phone for work, and I wanted to get a nice one. I have to pay the heating oil bill which is now almost two months in arrears. I have a credit card company champing at the bit to get proof that I'm not going to default on my debt, no matter how much I may want to do so, so this time around it's just me.

Well, it's just me and Malachi. He didn't cost anything extra to bring with, except perhaps a bit of indignity at the airport because I got searched. Having two laptops, a PDA and a Nintendo DS in the same bag will do that. I
even removed all the metal bits from my person so I wouldn't beep, and I still got picked. Lucky me.

Removing my collar to go through the metal dector was... uncomfortable. I have not removed it by my own hand since Jessie put it on me four years ago, and I have not wanted to remove it in all that time. I didn't want to remove it this time, either, but I didn't want to deal with getting wanded and the baggage search, so I erred on the side of caution and unclipped it before stepping through the metal detector. Even having gotten Jessie's explicit permission—nay, instruction—to do so, it still felt... dishonest.

The flight itself was relatively uneventful, a fact for which I am extremely grateful. Boring flights should be the norm. Though, Jessie and I were talking not too long ago about how air travel once held a mystique that has been lost in recent years. It used to be something glamorous, and now it's something necessary. It's a duty, not a priviledge. I miss the golden age of air travel, and want it back. So what if a few more towers get taken out? They were blocking the skyline anyway.

Part of that last paragraph is intended as humor. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine which part.

It's kind of weird. Being here by myself on a trip, I feel almost... feral. I'm out on my own, away from home, without anyone to guide me. Ordering lunch was almost a painful affair, trying to decide what would be reasonable on my diet. It's not that I can't fend for myself, but that without anyone here who knows me and will call me on my bouts of Stupid, I feel rather self-conscious. Lunch was perhaps a bit bigger than it needed to be: pork and chicken barbeque with a salad and fried okra. Not bad, but I could've done far worse.

The only place north of the Mason-Dixon line that does American barbeque that I've tried and liked has been Hickory Pit, which is this really cool restaurant built into a train station, so it's incredibly atmospheric. They also serve what has become known as the Big Gulp of Meat. Any of their meals, you an order to go in addition to dining inside. If you order thirty-two ounces of barbeque, they serve it to you in a styrofoam cup with a coffee lid on it, and a second smaller cup with sauce. It is literally a Big Gulp of Meat. I love it.

This place was a little dry, but the sauces were incredibly flavorful, so they made up for it. The okra and salad were... okra and salad. It's pretty hard to screw up either, though believe me I have eaten at places that have.

Work itself here is enlightening. The national returns center has automated things a lot more than the Bensalem or Denver plants, which explains why they can process as many orders as they do. We're nearing the point at the Eastern center of having to automate just to keep up with demand, something the general manager is not going to like but that I suspect will have to happen whether he wants it or not. He'll recoup his expenses in just a few years, but the initial outlay is going to hurt. Ah well, the march of progress.

Being in Bensalem, with the rest of my team either in LaGrange or Atlanta, I'm shielded from a lot of the politics at work, but being here in person I'm starting to hear about some of it. I can only say I'm glad to be in Bensalem,
where the only politics I really have to face are Operations trying to get AppSupport to do more than we're tasked to do, while avoiding letting us actually take over the things that we want to do. That I can manage; that's
all "talk to my boss."

Right now, I'm sitting in my hotel room in LaGrange, in the doorway, with the front door open, on the room chair, half in the breezeway. I am not at my desk, or in my bed with my laptop, because this is a concrete building with
heavy metal doors, and I am in the furthest room that I could possibly be from the hotel's WAP and still get signal. That is, when the door is open and I lean out into the hallway, I get signal. If I close the door, lean back, or
otherwise disturb my position, I lose it. Thus, to make this post, I am in the doorway. I am a junkie. Is there a C-Step Program for bitheads?

At some point soon I am going to go and find food, and then I am probably going to see if by some kind of magic potion or miracle antenna I can make my wireless card work in my room. It's getting chilly in the doorframe.

One day down, four to go. 

---

Edit: I called the front desk and told them about my wireless situation, and they relocated me to a new room free of charge. This one actually lets me close the door and windows while online. Most boss.

Okay, now that I'm almost two weeks into my job, I figure it's time to talk a bit about what I actually do now. I work for T-Mobile in their Application Support department, which means that when software breaks, it's my job to fix it, or at least to look at it and figure out why, then report my findings to my superiors. I don't actually write code on the job, but I do wade hip-deep in Oracle, SAP, and real-time production and supply chain issues, so I'm still furthering my job skills.

The curious thing about my office is that there's no HR department in my building. None. Anything human-resources or benefits-related has to go to Atlanta or Seattle to one of the home offices. So, the first day I arrived, I filled out all my paperwork on-site with my team lead as witness, then overnighted it all to Atlanta to the IT HR office. The woman with whom I spoke on the phone said that I should have an employee number by Thursday at
the latest, and that I could start filling out benefits paperwork as soon as one was assigned.

I finally got my employee number on Wednesday. My paperwork literally went missing for four days. They couldn't find the overnight envelope from DHL. Just when it seemed that I would have to redo everything and fax it directly to Seattle, though, they found the originals and spared me the need. It served as a delay, but nothing critical. 

I'm slowly pulling myself up to speed with everything I need to know at my new position, but there's a lot to learn. My team lead suggested that there was a six-month learning curve before I'd be out of the hand-holding stages. Six months. That's a heck of an investment. I don't think I've ever worked at a company that had such a long lead-in before being utterly production-worthy. I'm a little humbled, and a little nervous, but I think I'll do fine.

Most of my days so far have consisted of paperwork, reading documentation, and sitting in on meetings over the phone. I'm the only person in my department in my office; everyone else is down in Georgia. At some point, there'll be a counterpart to my position in Denver, but right now I'm serving both facilities, one remotely. This means most days I never see my boss, and I hear from my team lead on the phone every few hours to see how I'm doing. Mostly how I'm doing is "swamped with paper." I'm sure it will all make more sense once I have logins to the system and I can start actually going through the QA environment, testing things and seeing how they work instead of just reading about how they're supposed to work. For now, I'm sort of just treading mental water.

Come to think of it, I don't think I've worked at a company with an honest, genuine quality assurance environment for testing in three years. Scary.

Even better than the work, though, are the benefits. They covered Jessie. No questions. It was anti-climactic. When the website kicked back my request to have Jessie covered as my wife, I called the internal help desk
expecting to have to kick and scream and make ugly noises at people, but the rep on the other end said, "Oh, yeah, that's not really bug, but the website's just not coded to handle your situation. Print the form and fax it, then call the benefits rep and explain what's up. Here's her name and number."

All of my righteous indignation melted instantly.

I called the benefits rep, expecting a little more hassle, but then found out that I wasn't the first person at the company to deal with a legally-married same-sex spouse incurred through sex change. Blink. I'm not special! I could cry!

Actually, I am special: I'm the first new hire at the company bringing this problem in from outside. She said "email me—if you're comfortable doing so—an explanation of why she's your wife and not just your girlfriend, and I'll stick it in your file and then when they audit and see it, they'll just ignore it and go away." I did so, and an hour later, she wrote me back saying we were confirmed in the benefits plan under "Employee + Spouse".

I think I'm going to like it here. 

---

As of today, I'm restarting the Weight Chart. A few days ago, I started a new diet plan. Still doing the low-carb thing; that seems to help, though of course at this point it's nearly impossible to tell what works and what doesn't. However, I remember reading somewhere once that it's better for the metabolism to take in five or six smaller meals a day, rather than three or two larger ones. So, combining A with B, I've been breaking my daily food intake out to five smaller meals scattered throughout the day:

• Breakfast at 06h30 when I get up, usually eggs and yoghurt.
• Brunch at 10h00, lunch meat and veggies.
• Lunch at 13h30, more lunch meat, more veggies.
• Tea at 17h00, even more lunch meat and possibly a pudding cup or some beets if I feel fancy
• Supper at 20h30, something I cook at home.

If each mini-meal—I prefer to think of them as "mealettes"—is around 250 calories, then my daily intake is
1250, or about five-eighths what I should be eating to maintain minimum weight.

So goeth the theory, anyway.

So far, it seems to be working. Only time will tell if I can keep this up for long; most people don't eat this way, and I'm scheduled to go out of town for a week on a business trip where food-prep will be dificult. Still, I'm seeing some movement on the scale and my hunger hasn't been an issue, so something's going right.

I want to be thin; now I have to want it enough. 

So, I'm in the process of putting my life back together after nine months of unemployment and the insanity that has ensued since then. I called my credit card company—well, the one I hope to keep—and explained to them that I was recently employed and that as soon as I got my first paycheck they were getting everything in the past-due pile, and they seemed happy with this. I managed to pay a few of my bills. I may even have the nonsense with my previous bank sorted out to the point that I can close my old accounts in good conscience and then work towards opening some new bank accounts to handle my money.

Last Thursday morning, I went to open an account with National Penn Bank, because they had posted some really good mortgage rates, and I'm looking to get out from under Navy Federal Credit Union as quickly as possible, thanks to some really poor customer service policies and a financial screwup between them an MBNA.
I'd like to find a local bank, since I'm looking at keeping my house for the next five years at a minimum to build up some equity in my home, and because I'm increasingly running into problems with national chains of any sort in which customer service is any sort of issue. WalMart and Giant, they're fine, insofar as I never have to deal with anyone in charge of anything and they have better prices than the mom-and-pop stores that they drove out of business. Banks, insurance and other financial institutions, however, need a lot of interaction skills, and NFCU really blew it badly when a large pile of excrement impacted the circulation device.

So, I went into NatPenn and I very politely explained to the counterstaff that I would like to open an account but I've had some financial difficulties in the past, and I wasn't sure what my old bank is saying about me to the credit companies. The branch manager with whom I spoke was very sympathetic, said she understood my employment problems, and went to research my credit history in the federal reporting system. She asked me if I was from Texas natively, and I told her I moved to Pennsylvania five years ago and gave her my driver's license and Social Security card. She took them, compared a few things, and opened my account without a hitch.

That afternoon, I took Jessie to the local branch to get her added to my account, and the counterstaff there was very nice and took Jessie's information and went to enter it into their database. We waited a few moments, and the woman got a very puzzled look on her face. I asked her what was wrong and managed to peek uwop-ap!sdn at her computer screen, which says "ID CHECK FAILED" on it. She said that Jessie's information in the computer didn't match the information we had provided. We asked to see what the computer said, and she handed us a print-out.

The computer had tried to match on three pieces of information: name, address, and birthdate, and all three had failed. For name, the computer had her pre-transition name, minus one letter, indicating a transcription error. The address was five years out of date; it had the apartment in Texas into which she had moved when she first came down from Michigan, the rathole we abandoned shortly after arriving. For birthdate, they had no month or day. They only had a year, which was off by two. 

Something was very, very wrong.

We explained to the counterstaff that their computer had incorrect and long-expired information in it, and she said, "Well, I'm sorry about that, but we have to go with what the computer system tells us, because we get it right from Social Security, so you'll need to contact the Social Security office to fix your data, and then we can add her."

That night, a quick call to the Social Security office verified that, in fact, all her information in their database was right, and that the bank was using some kind of third-party verification system that had been populated with invalid information. The SSA official, in fact, suggested that we have the bank manager call in to verify the information over the phone. I was actually quite amazed to discover that someone who worked for the American government could actually be helpful without coercion.

Friday, I called the local NatPenn branch to ask them about the situation and told the woman on the phone that Social Security had verified what we told the bank, and that we were confused as to how and where they were getting their obviously-old information. The woman on the phone said, "Oh, we have an outside vendor provide all of that to us. You'll have to deal with them; we can't help you." I tried to find out from her who the vendor
was, but she wouldn't tell me, only that she couldn't help us because of the mismatch between supplied information and computer records, despite the fact that we had the Social Security office on our side telling us to have the bank call them to verify Jessie's records.

Today I called NatPenn's main office to tell them that their "third-party vendor" for credit reporting was five years out of date and that I would like to add my wife to my account and that we needed some method of either bypassing their obviously-inaccurate reporting system or else to get their information verified. The person with whom I spoke made no effort to find out to which account I was referring, or even to investigate the matter. She merely asked me at which branch I had had a problem, and then transferred me to that branch office.

When I got a representative on the phone at the local branch office, I did my best to calmly and politely explain that there was a problem in their outside vendor's financial data and that I would very much like to get my wife added to my account but that their third-party provider had some old information that was causing a problem with that. She said, "one moment, sir" and put me on hold.

I sat there, literally stunned, by her statement, until she came back and asked me "sir, what is your name?" I told her my name, and she in turn sat for about ten seconds in dead silence before saying, "I'm sorry". She then asked me for my wife's information and pulled up the record of trying to add Jessie to my account. I explained to her, in a not-quite-so-calm-and-polite fashion, that whoever their vendor was had lost track of my wife since before her sex change and that they really weren't inspiring consumer confidence. She said that there wasn't anything she could do to help me because the Social Security office would need to be informed first. I told her that Social Security had the right info and that it was the vendor with the errors. She said she didn't know what to do, then, but that she knew at that point she couldn't be of any further assistance.

I asked for the manager. She said the manager wasn't there, but that the assistant manager was. I asked to speak with the assistant manager. She said, "She's busy with a customer."

I told her I'd wait, and she stuck me on hold for seven minutes.

When I came off of hold—just beeps, no music—the assistant manager at the local branch informed me that the onus was mine—or more accurately, Jessie's—to get the matter corrected. I asked her if she was at all worried or concerned about the fact that their outside credit-check vendor was displaying inaccurate information. She replied that the "third-party vendor" I was so gleefully decrying was in fact the national credit checking system, and that they were required by law to treat it as authoritative unless we could supply overwhelming evidence to
support our claim that the reason it was out of date was that Jessie hadn't held a bank account in five years. I asked them what they would take as proof. She said that we had to provide proof of legal name change, a new
Social Security card, and something with the address and birthdate on it like a state identification card. I asked if the new SSA card was enough, as we had to have the legal change of name to get the card. She said she had to
have the legal name change paperwork to show when and on whose authority the name change was executed legally, that the SSA's claim was not enough.

Throughout this phone conversation, she continually attempted to insinuate through tone and wording that if we weren't trying to defraud the system then at the very least we were somehow responsible for proving we weren't
liars and cheats. She seemed utterly uninterested in the fact that the national database had bad data in it, insisting that she could override the faulty information with sufficient proof of our claim, but any attempt to discuss anything less than a filing cabinet's worth of paper was met with curt answers and "our hands are tied by the PATRIOT Act; we can't help you".

So, my question to the world at large is this: what is your typical banking experience? For those of you who have been through some sort of financial nonsense involving name changes, being out of the loop for a few months,
or otherwise not fitting the standard profile of the American Consumer, who do you use for your financial needs, and what sort of experiences have you had? I don't want or need discussions on the merits of the world of finance or of micro- and macro-economics and whether they're good for people or not. I'm just trying to find out if every bank is staffed with poor-quality customer service representatives. If so, I'm better off sticking with the moneymaker. If not, then I'd much rather go with a bank that is is more sympathetic to its customers' needs, even if they don't make as much money.

My desire at this point is to find some place that's actually got good customer service people working at the counter, explain to them my situation, open an account with them, then go back to NatPenn and publically close the account and cite the lousy customer service we received from four different representatives. I'm frustrated by the volume of legal bullshit that continues to plague us despite being long past the point at which we should
have both been done with this hassle, but that's not what broke the deal. The bank could have been patient, polite and concerned with our needs. They could have taken the time to point out what we needed to do. The customer
support staff could have even said, "hey, we're not really trained for these edge cases; we'd better refer you to the manager so someone can really help you". They did none of these things, and if I can at all benefit by going elsewhere, I will.

We deserve better than this. 

Nine-and-a-half months.

Forty-and-a-half weeks.

Two-hundred-ninety-eight days.

The past.

The first offer just came. It's better than I had any right to expect. I asked them to give me a day to consider my options. They said that was fine and that they'd be awaiting my call.

This morning, another recruiter from a month ago had called me out of the blue, telling me he thought he could get approval for the position he had offered me in January, and wanted to know if I was still available. I told him I was expecting a verbal offer today. He said he'd get me news by this afternoon.

Monday, I signed and returned a contingent offer letter for a contract position. I'm going to have to call them tomorrow and tell them how sorry I am that I'm not going to be able to accept their offer because someone else has extended a permanent position to me closer to home.

After all this waiting, to have my pick of positions. All of them are QA; none of them involve code.

I don't care. I have a job. 

---

So much has happened in the last nine months, and I have said nothing of any of it. When I first silenced my journal, it was with the idea that my period of unemployment would be brief and that I refused to fill the pages
with angst about my job situation when so many of my other friends had had it so much worse and actually deserved the bitch space. 

I had a home, a car, roommates, and unemployment benefits. I really didn't need to waste space over how rotten I felt that I wasn't working or how much hurt the lack of productive activity caused. I was managing to make ends meet, and everything was going to be okay.

Then the disasters started. The free health insurance vanished in July. The unemployment compensation ended in October. The sewer trap died on Christmas day. I totaled the Volvo early January. Aly committed suicide a week later. A credit reduction on one of my cards caused a bounce on a checking account that's led to an ongoing battle between two financial institutions over who is responsible for an error that keeps me away from my money to this day. Just in time for one problem to begin to fade, another rose to take its place.

Through it all were the interviews. The first job went to someone with twice my experience. The second to someone asking half my wages. The third decided they weren't really hiring anyone who didn't have a doctorate. The fourth went to someone with fewer skills but was fresh from college and didn't need much compensation. The fifth found a volunteer to do the same job for free. The sixth changed its mind at the last minute and decided they
needed someone with more marketing skills. The seventh needed skills they never mentioned in their application that I didn't have. The eighth and ninth just... never called back. Those are the ones I remember. There were
more, but they're lost in the haze that is "the job search."

I won't lie and say I faced this happily or gracefully. I broke down at times and wondered if I would find another job. I did, at one very brief moment, despair on my paper route and wonder if the Easy Way Out was in fact what the name suggested. The thought lasted all of thirty seconds, perhaps. Then I talked with Bear, and suddenly it all seemed... manageable. Not good but endurable. I chatted with Coyote and Rabbit, too, and spent an hour in conversation with them on my paper route, the part-time job I had found myself to keep me busy in the interim. It was the first time I had laughed in months.

There were good times that happened through it all, too. My parents came for a visit, and they brought me a vehicle and some money to help me make it through the hard patch. Anthrocon was a blast despite my work situation and the fact that I'm staff. The impromptu wake for Aly that Charmdown Park brought with them kept me cheerful through a rough patch. The weekend of smuggling twenty kilos of fairy dust past the Boston Banality Patrol. A four-day stretch of alcohol, Apotheosis and random gibberish. Far too many hours of Disgaea and other games. The kindness of my friends both online and off. The hopes and thoughts and prayers of countless people that I won't try to name. Thank you, every one of you, for your support. You know who you are.

If I get a second call today, I have a decision to make. Tomorrow, I have an offer to accept, and at least one I must regretfully decline. After that, the setting of a start date and the signing of an offer letter. After that... it's time for me to start putting my life back in order, and giving to all the people who gave to me during this period of hell.

I have survived Chapel Perilous. Only time will tell how it has changed me. 

Today is a day of mixed emotion.

Today, in Massachusetts, same-sex couples began receiving marriage certificates. Gay couples are lining up to tie the knot, and aside from a few snot-nosed punks from Westboro Baptist Church, the protests have been civil. Even the opponents have said, "what they're doing is legal, even if it's not moral; let them have their happiness," which I think is really big of them considering how hard they fought against this.

Today, an insurance agent told me that despite being legally married to Jessie, we're not "a couple" for insurance purposes because we're both women. Aetna has defined a couple in their guidelines as "one man and one woman with a marriage license," and the fact that we have one of those conditions doesn't mean we meet them both. I mentioned the whole Boston thing, and she said "Yes, ma'am, but that's not Pennsylvania, and the underwriters in
Pennsylvania have opted at this time to ignore the social progress happening in Massachusetts, though they reserve the right to change their minds later." At least she didn't shut me out completely, but it's still
highly irritating to be told that we may be married, but we're not a couple for purposes of insurance underwriting.

Today, I explained to a recruiter for the nth time that I lost my job for reasons I don't really understand. Thursday, April 22nd, I was an employee in good standing. Friday, Apreil 23rd, I was out on the street. I got a performance-based salary increase in November, and I got an out-of-cycle performance-based bonus in January. I never received a formal warning of any sort about my job performance, either written or verbal, prior to being let go. The company then fired the Director of Technology a week later for "performance issues" two weeks after he finished migrating a fifty-machine server room plus the rest of a major office space. Every recruiter to whom I've told all of this has been incredibly sympathetic, but none of them have jobs open for someone with my skillset
right now.

Today, the chair of the department of CIS at DeVry told me she wants to schedule an interview "some time in the next four weeks" for an adjunct teaching position. She was impressed enough with my perl and my database skills to pull me in to teach a class on programming and SQL, but it sounded like she didn't think I had enough meat on my proficiencies to be a full-time professor. It's still income, just not as much as I'd like. With any luck, though, I could do that part-time and get a full-time job elsewhere, which would be enough to keep me in the black.

Today, I made arrangements to rent a truck to go pick up some furniture that Tanya's uncle is donating, and then move the rest of the contents of the apartment into the house we've owned without use for five months now. The
doors are all off the hinges because the place had hardwood and now it has carpet, and the doors weren't meant for carpet, so they all have to be shaved to fit, but hopefully the repair crews are taking care of that detail as well. I won't know for sure until I hear back from the company, though, which should be tomorrow.

Today, I realized just how much packing and cleaning I have to do in three days. Despite all the boxes we've moved into the new place already, it feels like there's no way we're going to get everything moved in time on the
schedule I want to move by. My only hope now, really, is to clean and sort as much as possible between now and Friday and plan on picking up boxes from Tanya's workplace—since she works for a grocery store and they have all the boxes they want—and packing into the boxes when they show up, meaning we have to pack and move and then at least unload all over the same two days. This weekend is going to be painful.

Today, I found out that in four months, insurance companies consider me middle-aged.

Today, I reread all my old letters from my transition, the letters from my therapist and my clinical observer clearing the path for me to become legally and physically female, or at least the best approximant thereof possible in the World of Today.

Today is the greatest day I've ever known.

Today, I learned that the income I thought I would have by June 1, I won't have for some time afterwards, meaning I don't have enough to make ends meet unless I get a job real-damn-fast or I live on the credit card. I'm not angry about it, any more than I'm angry at losing my job in the first place, but I wish I had known things would go that way in the beginning so I could plan accordingly. This is going to require emergency measures to correct.

Today, I wondered where my home was.

Every year, I have to put together a bio for the Anthrocon staff booklet. Trying to find a new way to say the same thing every year has always been a bit of a challenge, but the fifty-word restriction has always been the single biggest shut-out. Trying to express "who I am" in fifty words or less has never been an easy task.

Last year I decided to deliberately break the form by writing a bio that hit exactly fifty words and cut off in mid-sentence. I thought this was terribly clever, but I discovered that someone else had come up with the same idea!
Convergent though, certainly; I didn't get the idea from the other party. I was, however, still disappointed to see that my originality had not been all that original.

This year, I think I've come up with something that not only easily comes in under the fifty-word limit but also should be in a form that others will not so readily adopt. Therefore, I present to you the Buni Alphabet:

1. Anthropomorphs.
2. Buni!
3. Computers.
4. DEVO.
5. Existentialism.
6. Furries.
7. Gender theory.
8. Humanism.
9. Illuminatus!
10. Jessie.
11. KALLISTI.
12. Linguistics.
13. Modernism.
14. Null Manifesto.
15. Objectivism.
16. Posthumanism.
17. Qiti!
18. Role-playing.
19. Stories.
20. Transformation.
21. Utopia.
22. Viridian.
23. Writing.
24. Xenophilia.
25. Yacatisma.
26. Zoomorphs.

I suppose enough time has now passed for me to talk about it, while I can still do so and have all the details fresh in my mind. I got laid off of work last Friday. I still have no real idea why, which is the really annoying part. I could handle the situation better, I think, if I had some clear understanding of what I did to warrant being terminated from my position, but as of yet nothing really adds up to a logical answer. They said it was for generating low-quality work and not performing according to task, but something about that doesn't jive with the rest of the facts at hand:

They're giving me a severance package.

People who get fired for incompetence don't get severance packages, unless they're CxOs of some sort. They're giving me through the end of the last pay period, plus another paycheck after that, without me having to do any work for them in return, while they're in the middle of a financial crisis because they've just moved into a new office and can't really afford a lot right now. This is not the behavior I would expect of a company firing someone for negligence or the level of mistakes I'm being accused of making.

They're giving me unemployment.

This is the single-biggest factor belying their statement that I did poor work. Companies don't pay their screw-ups unemployment, normally. If you botch something bad enough to get fired, that's it, you're history. Unless, of course, my understanding of unemployment policies is wrong, which I concede is possible. However, they told me to list "LACK OF WORK" as my reason for being terminated, and that they would back that up when the Department of Labor and Industry came asking about my application. I want to say that this isn't how they treated the other people I know who got fired, but I can't say that for sure.

They never gave me a warning.

My previous manager insists that I had three months of warnings and suggestions that my work was unsatisfactory and needed to be corrected, but as far as I understand employee-manager communication—admittedly not as far as I'd like, or these things wouldn't keep happening—a warning consists of a one-on-one meeting between manager and employee, or perhaps a three-way with an HR representative, in which the manager says "your work is unsatisfactory," and then either the manager or the HR rep presents a form for the employee to sign that goes in the employee's file. I know Beth got that kind of warning before she got fired, but I never did. The first I directly got any sort indication that I wasn't doing good enough work was the morning I got let go from the company. My manager insisted four times that the quality meetings and statements about "we all have to do good work all the time" and "we have to implement these quality metrics" were my warnings. That, pardon my French, is bullshit.

The other responsible parties didn't get the axe as well

This is the one that really burns me. If there were mistakes made, and I won't lie here in bed and say there weren't, 'cause there were, I know for certain I wasn't the only one making them, but apparently I was the only one who got hit. The database from which my department worked was riddled with errors generated by both the group responsible for getting data and the group responsible for creating the database, many of which we had no way of catching unless we knew to look for them, and how to identify them when they happened. The people who created those sorts of errors still have their jobs, probably because they were under different managers.

I hate to sound tinfoily, but I suspect ultimately what happened is that I did a sample project for a company that got used in a head-to-head comparison of our products against other companies', and because of a recent reranking of our address space—something done by another department—our results came in dead-last in the comparison. This cost the company marketplace credibility and probably a fair bit of money, and somebody at the sufficiently-elevated-as-to-not-directly-have-all-the-information level made the decision that somebody's head had to roll, and mine was the most easily accessible. They did some digging, found enough reason to make the charge of "poor quality work" stick, and stuck it hard and fast so they could say to whomever needed to hear it, "the problem has been solved."

Of course, the problem hasn't been solved, but they've bought themselves some breathing room to solve it, maybe.

I don't really want to see them burn in flames, 'cause my friend Bennie is still working there, and the last thing I want to have happen is to see him get caught in the crossfire simply because I think someone in upper management made a poor decision, but I really would like to know who decided what and why. Not that knowing would do me any good, mind you. If anything, it would make things harder. When I got fired from CRS, knowing that one person was ultimately responsible for the decision made the desire to act against that person quite strong. Not really having a target here keeps the anger from boiling up and out of control. There's nobody to be angry at. Not even me.

I can at best be angry with the circumstances that have brought me to this point, and hope that they don't happen again.

On the upside, Saturday I sent out several copies of my résumé, and Monday morning I had a voice mail at the new place waiting for me telling me that someone had seen my application for a position with a financial services company and was interested in talking with me more in-depth. I've called and the recruiter sounds quite positive, but is currently waiting for a more detailed job-description from the hiring company. Apparently they've had trouble filling this particular job because the data people complain about too much programming and the programmers complain about too much data management, meaning it's almost exactly what I was doing at HMS.

It would be exceptionally boss if I got a new job before the severance package for the last one vanished.

---

In the meantime, I'm working more on my novel and other short stories. I've got two more erotic pieces conceived that I need to write, and I need to work up the gumption to replace the chapter of Child of Man that I deleted by accident. Important note: the commands "vi" and "ci" are very close to each other on the keyboard. Further, "ci" doesn't make a copy when it puts it under revision control; it just sticks the file into revision control. Deleting the revision-controlled copy deletes the original file.

Further note: Recovering deleted files in linux should be attempted immediately after deleting, not half an hour later. This is especially true on a server system with multiple processes all running at once.

Thankfully it's nothing I can't recover by rewriting it, and doing so will let me clean the prose somewhat. I wasn't entirely happy with the segment, but I do know where I'm going and how I want to get there. I just have to put
all the ideas down onto actual hardcopy now.

I'll also have lots of time to handle moving into the house. We still have a lot of crap in the apartment that needs to be shunted over to the house, and we still haven't fleshed out the plan to do that. I'm still shuttling boxes over in the Volvo as I get time, then coming back after dumping stuff up in the attic.

It seems I have a lot of time, now, so at least the house should be easier to move.

A busy weekend, but a good one!

My last day of work this week was Friday, thanks to my company relocating to a new office. The management even told us to pack up and head home at 17h00 instead of 18h00 so they could start shutting down the computers early. Now, I had to pick up my car from the shop, meaning Tony had to come pick me up from work and take me to Manayunk to get it back, but even that's a minor setback. The car's now got a valid inspection sticker, and it didn't exceed the cost I'd expected to pay for the repairs.

On an absolutely tangential thread, how long are Pennsylvania inspection stickers supposed to last? Mine said April 2004 before, but I just got new ones and they expire in November, not April of next year. Is this a "call the shop and scream" offense, or just something about older vehicles in Pennsylvania I didn't know before?

Anyway, I got the car back, came home and packed for Jessie's and my weekend jaunt up to Boston, to visit LeDiva and the Posts. Every time I go there, I feel a bit like I'm coming home again. We left Friday after lunch, and put into Charmdown Park just before dinner, which means excellent timing on the trip. As Jessie put it, "[Kristy's] lead foot is usually a good counterbalance to New Jersey's accidents and construction", and this trip was no exception. Strangely, though, the real bulk of the traffic all appeared to be on the other side of the highway, going in the other direction. Most of the length of the MassPike was clear for me, and solid cars for the other side. 

The night we arrived, LeDiva showed us an episode of Mad Mad House, which I must say I found... odd. I like the fact that the people making the decisions about who stays and who leaves are not the ones competing for the prizes, but by the same token I don't like the fact that the show makes such a brazen attempt at deliniation between "normal people" and "alts". There's something mildly disappointing in that to me. It's the same sort of social compartmentalizing that happened in high school, and I thought the whole point of Breakfast Club was to show those divisions as artificial. The one saving grace is that it puts the power of ejection from the set in the hands of the freaks, which I must say is a nice touch.

Anyway, we also played a round of Star Munchkin the first night. I'm still not sure what I think of this whole series, and I've played it half a dozen times now. The ease with which fortunes reverse is disturbing, and the balance of power can shift wildly without warning. It's fun, but on the whole I'd still rather play INWO. Of course, to do that I would need to find my INWO cards and rebuild my decks. I think that they're boxed and packed and at the new place already, but I don't know that for certain. I'm going to be horribly annoyed if I've lost them, because I had a complete set of Assassins, and if I've lost that I don't think I can replace it anywhere nearly as cheaply. 

Dinner Friday night was some place called Joe's, which was a bit upscale but quite nice. I probably should've gone for a salad instead of the stuffed pork loin I got, but it was tasty and the green beans were nice and crunchy
without being undercooked. Everyone else split a chocolate cake dessert of some sort, which definitely looked worth the price of admission. Double, even, considering it was free. LeDiva didn't get her salad when everyone else got their meals, so they brought her a free dessert to compensate.

After dinner we retired back to the Park to relax and talk some more, and the typical Mental Synchronicity happened. I don't remember any specifics about the conversation, but I remember that we talked for hours and that I enjoyed it immensely. I think the catchphrase of the weekend was "Should I stop you because I've heard this one," in relation to the number of times in one person's life that events mirrored or paralleled someone else's.

Saturday we lounged about the house most of the morning, then went to pick up picnicky supplies for lunch. We tried to hit a local arcade, but sadly most of the machines were in disrepair and the floorspace was far too crowded with small children upon which I had to avoid treading by accident. It was a nice way to kill an hour or two, but I wish more of the machines had worked. They had a DDR machine, but I didn't feel up to the challenge of trying it in public having not exercised in nearly three weeks. I'm definitely behind on my workout routine, disturbingly so. I was good for several months, but I've fallen behind in recent weeks. I really need to get my workout routine back into full swing, but I keep saying I should wait until the move, which is stupid.

Dinner Saturday night was Brazilian Barbeque at the Midwest Grill, which was absolutely wonderful. Expensive, but well worth the cost of admission. Their garlic-crusted beef made me swoon, and their kielbasa were exceptional. My one mistake was allowing myself to be lured by the promise of a Caesar salad appetizer. Never eat veggies at a Brazilian barbeque. They are a distraction away from the meat. Ignore the veggies! Eat the meat!

After meat font, we went in search of Krispy Kreme, which was for everyone else a nice complimentary shock to the system and for me an exercise in masochism, watching everyone else snarf down hot doughnuts. I swear, despite the successes of my diet, I'm going to switch to South Beach after the next time I go off of it for kidney-protection purposes, at least long enough to see if it works for me. I've already promised Jessie I would, if only to give her a chance to share meals with me again. Plus, it will widen my dietary intake somewhat. I just have to be that much more vigilant about what I eat.

Speaking of eating, I really need to cut down on the Caesar salads, I think. I never realized until now just how much sodium the dressing contained. It's kind of a shame, but I need to drop back to regular chef salads for a while to see if that helps me break my plateau. Between that and exercise, I should see some positive results soon, I hope.

Sunday, sadly, both LeDiva and Postrodent had to take off early, but we sat around talking with Postvixen for... well... hours. We actually ended up leaving an hour later than I planned because we were so engrossed in discussion. I've decided to try running a second game, one more suited to that crowd, but I'm still in the initial planning stages for it. LeDiva, PostRodent, PostVixen, Jessie, if you've got any comments to add for things you'd be interested in seeing, let me know so I can try to work something into the story line. I've got a few niggling notions, but nothing concrete as of yet.

Jessie and I finally made it home and crashed shortly afterwards. As noted above, I love driving to Boston, but I hate the drive back. The conversations are all still fresh in my mind, and inevitably I'm already tired by the time
I'm halfway home, so the trip seems to drag forever. It's not a hard drive, just a longer one than I'd have to like to make for something I want to be a regular occasion.

Hopefully next time they can come down to Philly.

I didn't get a lot of sleep last night. Saturday I was up listening to GameCast, enjoying my bottle of twelve-year MacAllan, and playing .hack//quarantine until almost five in the morning. It would've been four in the morning, but because of DST we lost an hour, so Jessie and I didn't crawl out of bed on Sunday until nearly 14h00. This threw my schedule off for most of the day, and I didn't crawl into bed until well after midnight.

Once there, though, I should have snuggled up against Jessie's side and gone directly to bed. That would've been the sane option. Instead, we both lay awake for over an hour, talking about the sorts of things that only come to
light under those sorts of conditions. I joke about lying awake at night thinking about things I can't possibly answer, but last night it happened.

I'd blame Kincaid, but she's not really at fault. That post was a catalyst for thoughts that already plague my mind. Most of the time, I have the common sense—or perhaps the will to blindness—to not think about any of these things. I live in a bubble mostly by choice, because the world at large scares me in ways I can't really define. I don't understand what makes a lot of people tick, other than to say that they believe different things about the world from me, and they let their beliefs guide their actions. That's all well and good, but what happens when their beliefs—immune to logic, reason or reconciliation—contradict mine?

There're a lot more of them than there are of me.

In a proper democracy, there'd be some understanding of the principle of "majority rules, minority rights." Everyone knows the first part, but most people forget the second. It's that part of the Master Plan as conceived by the Founding Fathers that makes majority rules possible: the understanding that there are certain lines one just doesn't cross, because if one should ever find oneself in the minority one wouldn't want those same lines crossed.

This is the step that most people forget, the most crucial and significant part. Less than a month ago, I had someone try to tell me in earnest that it was alright to trample on my rights and deny me the right to express my opinion if that were what the majority believed were in the best interest of everyone involved. He even went so far as to say that were he in the minority, he would expect me to do the same to him and thought the point was
to ensure that one never became part of the minority, so as to avoid that fate.

He didn't really seem to grok the idea that everyone is a minority of one at some level. That's what makes us truly individual, as opposed to approximate clones of each other.

All these thoughts came to me last night, as Jessie and I lie awake, talking about them. I really do fear for the future of my country. I believe in the ideals upon which it was founded, but I have lost my faith in the notion that we properly implement those ideals, or even that we can fix the mistakes we've made in trying. The founding fathers envisioned an educated populace, eminent statesmen of office who held strict moral codes, a government run primarily on inertia, and a wealth of political parties to offset the inherent evil of idea-labeling. We have none of these things with any regularity, and when we get them they are often as not decried as part of the evil of "partisan politics."

Running to Canada will not make anything better. Staying here will not make me feel safer.

I don't know what I want right now. I want to believe that the situation is going to improve, that the American people will at some point realize what they have allowed to become of their country and take back the glory that
should have been theirs by right. I want to think that a revolution like the Summer of Love is just around the corner, that we will somehow realize that we have been asleep for so very long and the time to wake up is at hand. 

All I can really do is plan for the day when I never have to leave my house again, unless I choose to do so.

I am not a hero. I do not dream of taking on the world. I will not be one of the ones taken to Atlantis. I want to be like Candide, and tend to my own little garden. I want a hole in the ground into which I can crawl and not these about these things, because I'm too smart to be able to leave them alone and too dumb to know how to fix them. I want my hutch, the inviolate walls of a cage to protect me for when I no longer have the strength to
protect myself.

I'm not Dagny; maybe I never was. At best, I'm Cheryl, struggling to make sense of a world I didn't create. All I can truly hope is to avoid her fate.

Today has been a treasure. Yesterday I got to work, had one project that consumed most of my day, and got it done. This morning I got to work and had nine things on my desk, all of which had to be done rightthisminute.
Now, I had slated two of them to be done when I got to work, and one of them to start the following day when the data arrived, but the data arrived a day early, I had a project from the previous week ask for more information, a project from the last month ask for additional data, a "quick side task that should only take ten minutes" show up on my plate, a request for QC checks and documentation for a make-or-break task due Friday, and then my ongoing Death-March project of file-loading into Moloch Mk III hovering over my head.

I got a bit snippy with my project manager when she called me to ask me if I had room on my plate to handle something. I wonder why.

Later I did apologize to her for it, but she said she totally understood when she went back and looked at my workload. One problem this company has—and which we are desperately trying to fix"is a severe project tracking deficiency. We're improving steadily, but it's still very easy to overwhelm one person and leave others bored. We've also got enough work outstanding to keep a good half-dozen folks busy, but the tools we're using aren't up to the needs of a "generic user" yet, and it's not cost-effective to employ six trained professionals to do the work that any generic user should be able to handle.

We've got a new project lead for Moloch Mk III, apparently, as well as a UI designer, so hopefully that will improve.

I have actually decided as of this moment to christen our big in-house software tool "Moloch Mk III", for the following reasons:

1. In the movie Metropolis, when Freder hallucinates in the Worker's City and visualizes one of the Great Machines as a demon eating rows upon rows of chained workers, he cries out the name "Moloch".
2. Some people may remember the name Moloch from the old D&D books as one of the Lords of Hell. I think he ruled over the sixth Hell, but don't hold me accountable to that.</geek> 
   
3. We're currently coding v3.0 of the software, hence the Mk designation.

Can you tell how much I love this piece of software? In order to use it properly as it stands, one must not only know perl (to write "expressions", which is a euphemism for arbitrary subroutines), but one must understand something of the underlying mechanisms by which the tool operates and have a good idea of how the programmers think about the tool, because nothing in the interface is intuitive from a process-flow perspective.

To give you an idea of how bad this thing is, the UI designer we hired to fix its "idiosyncracies" stopped taking notes and just started laughing about fifteen mintues into the hour-long demonstration I gave on how to load files. She put down her pen, shook her head, and laughed. Loudly. Repeatedly. It went from being a lecture to being a game of "how much worse could it get."

The only reason I know as much about it as I do is because I use it every day, and I'm good at rote memorization. I can only hope in the long run she can tame this beast, 'cause nobody else has managed.

All of this, and it's only Tuesday.

---

I've been dallying in the stock market for a while now—a little over three years—and I've tried some various strategies in the past for "making money" that, for the most part, didn't work. The Motley Fool was an invaluable research source when I first started, but I haven't looked at their site in over a year. It's not that I'm any sort of expert. Far from it. If I were an expert, I wouldn't be as far in debt as I am and as stressed over money as I get. I'm just someone trying to start saving for retirement with an idea towards what it would take.

My father always used to hound me on the power of saving money, and I never really listened to him, but now I'm starting to see it. I just wish I had more money to save. I spent another two-hundred dollars today putting fuel oil in our sparkly-new oil tank for the first time, so the workmen at the house could get some heat back into the house and see how badly damaged the plumbing system is. We know at least one toilet needs to be repaired. Hopefully that's the extent of the problem, but I doubt it.

Little by little I'm coming into the idea of putting together something in the project area of the site dedicated to my endeavors in the stock market. I could probably put together something similar to my weight chart, only it would need to read a configuration file to determine what stock I own, how much I paid, and what my return so far is.

I should get a rather nice chunk of change from the insurance company for last month's electricity bill and next month's rent. After that the real fun begins, 'cause Wissahickon doesn't do month-to-month, only short-term leases, and I'm not locking myself into another three months in this place, even if it is on somebody else's dime. It's just not worth it. The repair company said it should be "four to six weeks from the start of repairs" to be ready to move into the house, so I'm hoping it's closer to the four end of that so we can have two weeks to get into the house.

Wouldn't you know that'd put us almost square on top of moving offices at work, too?

As soon as we're moved into the house, I'll be ready to start the process of getting a debt consolidation loan to put all the past debt into a single source and make a plan for getting rid of it once and for all. It may be five years of pain, but that'll be better than paying the insurance companies through the ears in finance charges. Once that's secure, I can maybe get rid of one of my cards, now that Jessie has a copy of the debit card, and start getting back into an even financial keel.

It feels weird, worrying about stock dalliances while so far up to my ears in debt, but if there's one thing I know about the market that I've heard every professional say without hesitation, it's that time in the game matters more
than the rules by which you play, simply by the nature of the beast, so I'm trying to get my paws wet now so that when I can afford more I know more or less what I'm doing.

My goal is to be making as much on my stocks as I could at my day job by the time I'm sixty. I don't think that's an unreasonable goal.

Only time will tell.

Today's actually a fairly big day for me. I've finally done something I've wanted to do for a long time. I've put something I wrote up for sale.

I keep wanting to describe it here as vanity, but it's more than that. It's my writing. It's for sale. It's my writing for sale. Anyone who's an artist can describe this feeling. Few outside those who sell what they create can. There's something incredibly empowering in the idea of making a living on the fruit's of one's creative endeavors. It's powerful. This is in no way "making a living" on it, but if even one person pays money to read it, then I've accomplished a goal. I've written something I wanted to write, and had someone give me money for it.
I'll have sold my creative writing.

One dollar, in that context, seems pretty lousy. Professional rates for authors when I was growing up was three cents a word. At three-thousand, four-hundred-seventy-three words, three cents a word is over a hundred
dollars. Most people will not pay a hundred dollars for five pages of written text. Even I wouldn't pay that much. I would love it people did, but they don't.

The price-point's actually probably about right. It's little enough to seem like a pittance to most people, and enough to actually be worth my time. I only see eighty cents out of that buck, but that's more than zero which is
what I'd get if I just put it online on my website. I do intend to keep writing and giving stuff away, because I enjoy writing, but I do want to at least focus some amount of my time towards writing for payment. I'd like to see some kind of positive return on my investment, and I think I'm good enough to get it, if I can just get my name out there.

Jessie actually quipped while I was writing Lateral Promotion that I'd never make it as a porn-writer because I take too much pride in my work. I can't crank it out fast enough and I spend too much time worrying about plot and character and setting and not enough time worry about which tab fits into whose slot. I'm hoping I can prove her wrong, but it'd be nice to sell more than just smut.

That's where Child of Man fits into the picture.

I've been working on this novel for the better part of two years now. I won't say it's become all-engrossing because I am writing things other than that—Lateral Promotion, for example—but it is sucking away large amounts of my brain power trying to keep the thing moving. I'm already at thirty-two thousand words and counting. I know, I know. NaNoWriMo people crank out more than that in way less time, but few of them try to sell the products of their effort. This is something I think I can actually market if I put some effort into it.

Now I just have to see if anybody bites the hook.

---

This week, actually, has been quite good overall. Tanya came out for a visit, and it's always good to see her. I picked up some fresh cosmetics for Jessie that should do what her concealer wand wasn't handling. I got word that the repairs on the house have finally started. The previous owner of the house has contacted me and confirmed that he's going to finish siding the garage. There've been a few big dips, but right now they seem pretty
inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

It's always nice to feel like things are getting better.

Right now, I am livid. I use that word a lot when this sort of thing happens, but I know of no better word for it. I feel an impotent anger directed at a faceless system whose representatives are trying their hardest to accomodate
an unexpected situation within a broken paradigm.

Jessie got her legal gender fixed on Saturday. Great. Wonderful. She's a chick now as far as the state of Pennsylvania and the Social Security Authority are concerned. Excellent. This means that we're now in a legally-married same-sex relationship. I am apparently the source, or at least a source, of the downfall of Western civilization.

I've chosen to start with Independence Blue Cross.

I called my benefits rep to get Jessie's information fixed on Friday, in anticipation of the success at the DMV—a success, mind you, which went far beyond either of our expectations, and for which I'm inordinately proud of her—and she said at first that there shouldn't be any problems, then later called me back to tell me she'd hit a snag with updating Jessie's information in the computer system.

It seems that IBX has their software set up such that when two people are entered into the system as a married couple, the sex of the one listed as "spouse" is instantiated as a dependent field, linked to the sex of the one listed as "applicant". This is there to prevent typos, but it also locks out updates if one member of the married couple should happen to have zir sex legally changed. There isn't even a "try it and see" option. The field is locked. It can't be changed.

Their software will allow same-sex couples into the system, but not as a married couple. It calls them "domestic partnerships" and simply refuses to acknowledge them as anything but. That option then is forced into a different category of insurance. They're no longer married as far as IBX is concerned. They're "partnered" and it's a whole
different ball of wax as to whether or not we're covered.

Now, the benefits rep told me all of this on the phone and later again in an email, and she said to me that I needed to call IBX and ask them for an exception or an override in their system so that the claims that came back that had Jessie listed as female wouldn't get rejected. I know they can do this because they did it for her prescriptions so her premarin wouldn't get rejected. That took a doctor's note, so I called IBX to find out how to get this override put into the computer.

They told me on the phone that no such option exists.

Now, to their credit, they did tell me that I had options. I could contact my company and ask them to have domestic partnerships added to our insurance options, or I could have Jessie removed from my policy and added as a separate single enrollee not linked to my entry in the database. Neither of these reflect the actual legal status of our relationship, but while they acknowledged that verbally on the phone they also seemed totally oblivious to
it. It was amazing.

I managed after much waiting and wrangling to get someone in the Enrollments department on the phone, who cheerfully explained to me that domestic partnerships didn't cost anything(?!?!?!) to add to a group policy and that having our policy holders add that to their insurance coverage would make the whole problem simply go away on its own. When I finally got a word in edgewise, I asked why Jessie was no longer covered on my policy. The conversation went something like this:

• $buni->say("Jessie and I are legally married, yes?");
• $rep->say("Yes.");
• $buni->say("My group policy covers legally married couples, yes?");
• $rep->say("Yes.");
• $buni->say("Thus, Jessie should be covered under my policy, yes?");
• $rep->say("No.");
• $buni->say("Why not?");
• $rep->say("Because Jessie is now female.");
• $buni->say("At what point in my previous two statements did I say anything about male or female?");
• $rep->say("....");
• $buni->say("You do acknowledge that we are legally married, yes?");
• $rep->say("Yes.");
• $buni->say("And you acknowledge that the policy my company uses covers legally married couples, yes?");
• $rep->say("Yes.");
• $buni->say("So, does it not logically follow that Jessie, as my legally married spouse, should be covered under my insurance policy which covers legally married couples?");
• $rep->say("No.");
• $buni->say("Why not?");
• $rep->say("Because Jessie is female.");
• $buni->say("This sounds like a defect in your software.");
• $rep->say("Oh, no, ma'am! This is no defect. You have to have domestic partnership coverage if you want Jessie on your policy.");
• $buni->say("We don't have a domestic partnership. We have a legally recognized marriage according to the state of Pennsylvania. Where in this discussion did anybody mention domestic partnerships?");
• $rep->say("Well, Jessie is female now, isn't she?");
• $buni->say("....");

Again to her credit, she said she would call our benefits rep on my behalf and ask them to ask IBX to add domestic partnerships to their coverage package at no charge(?!?!?!) to the company, so that our situation would be resolved transparently without ever having to do any of the following: 

• admit that IBX's software is defective because it does not take into account the concept of a legally-recognzied same-sex marriage
• consider the possibility that the software, or the policy, should be corrected in advance of the situation surely to follow when Massachusetts, California, and New York all finish with their legal folderol, assuming the federal government doesn't FSU with its FMA
• apologize for the insult of telling me repeatedly on the phone that my legally-sanctioned marriage is somehow "not a real marriage" because their software is not in error when it rejects the correction to
  Jessie's gender, saying that we need domestic partnership coverage for that

She could've outright refused to help me on the phone. She could've done a lot of things that would have really gotten under my collar and made me blow my stack in a very audible way, even from the front conference room. She was as helpful as I'm sure she thought she could be. That in no way mitigates the fact that I feel as though I have been verbally insulted. I tell myself I shouldn't take offense, but it's hard not to feel demeaned by the whole
experience. I didn't have this much trouble when I changed my sex, but at the time we weren't legally married; we were just fighting for recognition as a couple, and not even that actively.

I can only hope that the upside to this is that my company will add domestic partnership coverage to its policy, but doing so doesn't fix the real problem. We're not a domestic partnership. We're married, and yet they sat there on the phone and told me without malice or regret that despite being married they couldn't cover Jessie as my dependent because she's a chick now, and that wasn't marriage according to their software. The real fix
is correcting the software, but try telling that to a midlevel bureaucrat.

I should've asked to speak with a supervisor. Barring that, I should've marched my way up the chain of command. The rep with whom I spoke is supposed to call me back this afternoon or tomorrow morning. If the answer isn't "your situation has been resolved" I'm going to have no choice but to start pushing my way up the line to talk to someone who can fix this, 'cause this time the fault isn't mine. It's theirs.

Now I just have to convince them of that.

---

As an afterthought, what really blows my mind on this is that twice on the phone with me she said that it cost a company nothing extra to cover domestic partnerships as equal to marriage. Nothing! Not one red cent more! Not a single penny over what we currently had to pay!

So why don't more companies cover domestic partners?

Every HR rep with whom I've ever spoken about it has said that the cost of covering the extra people on the plan didn't justify the personal savings the employees who needed it would see, but here on the phone someone from the enrollment group openly and actively said to me that it didn't cost them anything to add it! This can only mean one of two things: 

1. The woman on the phone was lying to me.
2. The HR reps were lying to me.

I would very much like to know which it is.

---

I just got a call from the benefits rep, and she said basically that if I ever get a bill for anything, I'm not to call IBX and complain, or the doctor's office to challenge it. I'm to fax it to her and forget about it. This isn't supposed to be my responsibility; it's hers. This is her job. This is what she does.

I feel like I've been pardoned.

I'm still angry that the situation exists, but I'm at least relieved of the responsibility of worrying about it. This is Someone Else's Problem.