Roofing in August

I did lots of policy writing, and SOP writing with a medical insurance company. I was often forced to do phone customer service as an “additional duties as needed” work task.

On this particular day, I was doing phone support for medicaid customers, during the covid pandemic. I talked to one gentleman that had an approval to get injections in his joints for pain. (Anti-inflamatory, steroid type injections.) His authorization was approved right when covid started, and all doctor’s offices shut the fuck down for non emergent care. When he was able to reschedule his injections, the authorization had expired. His doctor sent in a new authorization request.

This should have been a cut and dry approval. During the pandemic 50% of the staff was laid off because we were acquired by a larger health insurance conglomerate, and the number of authorization and claim denials soared. I’m 100% convinced that most of those denials were being made because the staff that was there were overburdened to the point of just blanket denying shit to make their KPIs. The denial reason was, “Not medically necessary,” which means, not enough clinical information was provided to prove it was necessary. I saw the original authorization, and the clinical information that went with it, and I saw the new authorization, which had the same charts and history attached.

I spent 4 hours on the phone with this man putting an appeal together. I put together EVERY piece of clinical information from both authorizations, along with EVERY claim we paid related to this particular condition, along with every pharmacy claim we approved for pain medication related to this man’s condition, to demonstrate that there was enough evidence to prove medical necessity.

I gift wrapped this shit for the appeals team to make the review process as easy as possible. They kicked the appeal back to me, denying it after 15 minutes. There is no way it was reviewed in 15 minutes. I printed out the appeal + all the clinical information and mailed it to that customer with my personal contact information. Then I typed up my resignation letter, left my ID badge, and bounced.

24 hours later, I helped that customer submit an appeal to our state agency that does external appeals, along with a complaint to the attorney general. The state ended up overturning the denial, and the insurance company was forced to pay for his pain treatments.

It took me 9 months to find another 9-5 job, but it was worth it.

Was doing pager duty support and there was a bug in a pipeline which was preventing a vital report from being generated. It had to exist by 8AM UTC and finally got it working at 5:30AM. My company would have lost its license to operate in a certain state if the report had not been generated.

Working as a laborer putting in asphalt driveways in 100-degree summer heat. It’s backbreaking work even without the heat.

The upside was that I grew shoulders and back muscles, and my cholo Spanish swearing was fluent by the end of the summer. And like a fool, I went back for two more summers after that.

Pro tip: kerosene gets asphalt off your skin. E45 replaces the skin oil the kerosene strips out.

18 hours on a solar power plant in ~120° F heat replacing burnt up reactors and busbars in the inverters, covered in glycol which is like an antifreeze that is real sticky and somehow smells / tastes sweet (but is still gross af) so all the bugs are attracted to you and crawl all over.

Cleaning up a dead relative’s house after they were hoarding.

Worked 33h in a row as a paramedic. Normally not allowed here (24h is a hard limit, 12h standard). Not because I wanted to, not because someone got ill…we simply didn’t make it even close to the depot, for the last 4h simply a major crash happened right in front of us.

We returned to the depot and basically didn’t even have a single wound dressing, no O2, no collars, no blankets,nothing.

And the worst part: The whole time it wasn’t “the usual business” of old folks having a stroke or a fall. We had one mass casualty incident at the beginning of shift, a child in respiratory arrest and similar shit.

I slept for 12h straight after that and still felt like shit.

House removals. 17hr day. 37 degrees celcius. Moved two three bedroom houses.

Used to load shipping containers in the Aussie sun but we’d start early. 32 ton in 25kg bags, 3x week.

Worked as security at a Serbian nightclub. It was not good. Violent, capable coked up Serbs.

I used to work at a really shitty metal factory as an engineer. I’d have to help get the lines going again after our weekly shutdown, and it was always a 24-30 hour work day, once per week. So 5 am until 5-10 am the next day. Very little for breaks (though they did feed us), almost never any sleep. That drive home after was harrowing. It probably would have been safer if I was drunk

For all my hard work and dedication I got rewarded with fucking nothing because that’s how capitalism works

We spent 2 hours doing CPR on a lady who worked in our hospital, while her husband watched and cried. She was young and the cardiac arrest was unexpected so we tried everything we could. Despite all our efforts we didn’t manage to get her back. CPR is not like it looks in movies and shows, it rarely works and is brutal on the person who’s died. CPR is physically exhausting to perform, generally you rotate so you’re only doing about 1-2 minutes at a time but even with breaks it’s still very hard work. Add on the emotional shock of an unexpected death and supporting a grieving partner, it was a naff day. One of the worst parts is you’ve got to go back on the floor afterwards and carry on like it’s normal.

Simultaneous interpretation. My first time out I did 20-30 minutes and had to lie down immediately afterwards. You’d think that just listening to someone else talk and then just repeating them in another language would be easy, but you have to buffer quite a bit to get the interpretation right, and then talking and listening at the same time is also pretty hard.

Shooting weddings is uniquely draining, physically and mentally. 16 hours on your feet carrying weighty kit, putting your body in awkward positions to get the right angle, needing to stay hyper alert so you don’t miss the perfect shot, constantly thinking ahead, all with the added pressure to not fuck things up. I’ve done some really gruelling location work with even longer days but weddings are always the hardest.

Just out of uni I couldn’t get a job in IT so I went and did labouring. It was the lowest money ive ever made and the hardest ive ever worked.

I’d get up at 4:30am get ready and catch the train in. Then wait and hope to get selected for a decent job if I didnt j go home with nothing. One day I got picked to do a plank replacement on a pier. We jumped jin the van and headed out. started at about 6am and finished at 6pm. We had to walkout on these metal beams above the sea and lift these giant rotting wooden beams similar to railroad beams but longer they must have been over 100kg each and carry them to a pile then grab a new beam and carry it out. Each one was a 2 person lift which made it slow and by like hour 6 my strength was giving out on me and by hour 8 my fingers could barely hold on so I kept having to rest the beam on my leg or shoulder. Also I was the only one who spoke English so communicate was hard. At the end of the day the builder the builder asked me to come back and help the next day because i spoke English. I said fuck no.

I made $120~ for that and i was to sore to work so I lost the next 2 days of work which means I basically lost money. My legs, shoulders and arms were so bruised uo from resting the planks on them. The company that I worked for also later ended uo scamming me 3 days of wages and i was to young and naive to fight it. Fuck you allied workforce most dogshit place ive ever worked.

That’s a tough call. I would say the hardest was when I was on the board of a regional charity organization and we caught the CEO embezzling. If you’ve never dealt with something like that before, it’s hard to imagine the river of shit that is coming your way.

This dude, who was paid a decent salary and benefits, very smugly told us that he felt he was more entitled to the money than the people who actually needed it. I’ve never wanted to punch anyone so badly. Firing him was the easy part. Dealing with the criminal investigation and the loss of community trust was the hard part. That was more of an emotionally exhausting year and a half rather than just a day though.

I was chasing a bug. Complete showstopper for a new system in which we had invested a lot to be the next big thing. And the responsibility lay with me.

I wrecked my brain on the two weeks towards Christmas trying to get it stable. I tried every trick in the book. I tried some more things after Christmas. Nothing, absolutely nothing made the system any better. I started to get anxiety attacks and breakdowns. I cried at work. Four weeks of bug hunting, and still no idea what actually went wrong.

In the end, it turned out to be a crazy hardware issue, something I could not fix in any way with software. One part for a tenth of a cent changed on each board, and the system ran like a charm.

Boss gave me the rest of the week off to recover.