I Hate Your Health Benefits

How out of place is the construction worker here? What is he doing with the doctors?? I love this picture, I'm going to frame it and put it on my desk.

I work for a company that has recently been usurped by an even larger company. I believe my job is safe, but you never know, considering I cut my own hair and get spontaneous bloody noses and bleed all over my desk, rug, and garbage can. I'm sure the cleaning lady just ADORES this. Regardless, there is one thing that I am going to have to deal with in the near future that to me is the equivalent of rinsing my eyeballs with bleach and fire: signing up for a new health benefits. It is the fucking WORST. I would rather spend an hour picking the fleas off homeless people with my teeth. You have to be a fucking astrophysicist to even understand the introductory paragraph. Flex spend? What the fuck is that? It sounds like a football audible.

I will never understand my benefits. I get packets in the mail thicker than the phonebook that immediately go into the garbage. Too intimidating for me. I had to read War and Peace in college, and I will never read anything that mirrors the size of that boring piece of shit. Fuck your health benefits manual. And fuck your change to my health benefits. Trying to squeeze another penny out of us again, are you? Trying to raise our co-pay so you can give some executive another $10,000,000 bonus? Die in a fucking forest fire.

Talking about health benefits is all white noise to me. You could sit me in a bare room with a one-on-one coach who's threatening me with a cattle prod, and I would still lose focus within seven seconds and start thinking about what I will eat for dinner, who should set up for Mariano Rivera, and how the internet works. The teacher might as well be speaking Mandarin Chinese because I will NEVER understand any of it. I could ingest a vile of ritalin and not absorb one ounce of relevant information.

I obviously blame much of this on my three-second attention span, but I also blame the complexity of the system. Online sign-up takes seventeen hours. You can be approved for a mortgage quicker than it takes to create a secure password. Use thirteen vowels, seventeen numbers, three smiley faces and thirty four symbols. Welp, already forget that password, fuckface system, looks like I'll be calling the helpline 38 times and politely asking the Indian man to repeat EVERY WORD HE FUCKING SAYS.

When I finally log in, the homepage opens 500,000 extra windows on my computer. Why this happens, I don't know. But I can't stand it. Being borderline OCD, I start sweating and panicking the minute this happens. Then I sign off immediately and abandon my progress and then go outside and get hit by a delivery truck and die because there is a lapse in my benefits coverage. Fuck you, Karma.

And much like the rest of white collar hell, since my company includes health benefits as part of my salary - which is fucking horse shit to begin with, seeing that I never go to the doctor so I basically donate money twice a month to the fucking motherfucking company I already work for - I think they should be responsible with signing me up for the appropriate health benefits. Why should I have to comprehend medical verbiage that ends up depressing me, thus forcing me to abandon hope on mankind and watch depressing-as-fuck movies like "The Deer Hunter"?

How much money could it cost for my HR rep to sit me down, run through a list of ailments, and pick the plan that best suits me? Probably less than my bi-monthly investment into the company, so fuck you guys, help me already! Stop sending me to some fucking seminar run by some asshole who talks to me like I'm fucking seven years old when I ask a basic question. You think I'm dumb, well who fucking hit the tying run in the 9th inning of Game 4 of the 2001 World Series? Who directed "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"?? ARE YOU SARAH CONNER??? Oh you don't know the answers to these questions, wow, what a fucking MORON you are! Hey everyone, this fucking doctor over here doesn't know dick about anything other than deductibles! WHAT AN IDIOT!

/incites riot
//arrested

It's all a bunch of bullshit, anyway, because your company will fire you waaaaaaay before you're old enough to be sick all the time and need tons of benefits. Then you're up Shit's Creek without a paddle, and while the company is busy celebrating the promotion of a healthy 28 year old VP who went to Yale, you're fucking dying in an alley somewhere with whooping cough.