fury

I am FURIOUS with Northwestern University right now, so I need to do a little bit of venting. One would think that such a prestigious university would have its shit together but alas, they do not. Not even CLOSE. Today's incident is merely another to add to the myriad of problems this University has caused me since I enrolled. I went down to Walgreens about an hour ago to pick up my prescription for the new Paxil "controlled release", which is supposed to remedy the sleep problems that I've been experiencing as a side effect of the regular Paxil. The woman told me that as of August 31, 2006, my insurance had been TERMINATED. TERMINATED. That insurance that I paid 2K for last year had been TERMINATED. Ok, I think you get the point. So, I stomp out of Walgreens and back up to the office (the Walgreens is literally on the ground floor of the office) and get on the phone with NU insurance. The woman calmly assures me that "this is a common problem for everyone right now" since things rolled over to the new school year as of September 1st. School doesn't start until September 19th, and apparently, until that time, my insurance is in some sort of state of limbo where they won't pay for anything. The woman said that the only solution is to pay for the medication out of my pocket and get reimbursed at a later date. This further ignited my fury, but as I have been dealing with these people for a year now, I know exactly the sort of tone and vocabulary and assertiveness needed to properly bitch out a Northwestern employee. I told her that this was unacceptable, that I cannot afford to pay for a prescription out of my pocket right now, and asked her what would happen if, say, someone had a life threatening emergency or condition during these precarious three weeks of non-coverage. I explained that, while my condition was not life-threatening and merely well-being threatening, this gap in service puts many people at great risk. I refused to accept this paying-out-of-pocket as an answer, and in return she received all of my bitching gracefully and promised a return call from the supervisor. (Which two hours later still hasn't arrived). I've got about 200 bucks in my bank account, two overdue cable bills, and a credit card bill that badly needs paid off--I really can't afford to charge a shitload of medicine at this point. And I need a good night's sleep so badly that I'm willing to go to great lengths to procure this medication.

After I got off the phone I had the following conversation with Mary in the cube next to me:

Mary: "Are you sure you don't want to work for us? We could really use your phone persuasion skills here."
Me: "Do you have good health benefits?"
Mary: "Yeah...geez, that was really impressive. I don't have the balls to talk like that to people on the phone."

I think she was referring to the part where I berated the woman about Northwestern having such poor administrative efficiency for being such a highly regarded institution. Highly regarded my ass. The school underwhelms me on a near-daily basis.

I'll briefly talk about the other crises I faced (so as not to bore you much more):

-being assigned, for some unknown reason, two student ID numbers, one with the correct SSN, one with the incorrect SSN, which resulted in having none of my loans disburse during Winter quarter and having to repeatedly make appointments with financial aid and get cash advances so that I could eat and pay my rent
-being denied free counseling because they were too "booked up" (presumably with all those affluent undergrads with "stressful" lives) although i must say that i love my shrink, even if i do have to pay $25 a session
-having continuous battles with health services. their rules and policies are really beyond me, and i can't even begin to understand them

Now, this is just a hypothesis, but based on what I've seen and heard at Northwestern, it is HIGHLY political. I know, I know, everywhere is highly political, but I've never seen anything quite like this. My educated guess is that most of the people working in administration are friends of friends of higher up people...and so on. Perhaps if they started hiring qualified people to run things, there would be less mishaps and the students, espcially the grads and doctorals who rely on the University for their livelihood, would be much happier people. I know I would.