Much day, many errands
Today: Many errands and such.
(Content warning for discussion of a cancer death.)
This morning, I finally got the info I needed and signed up for COBRA health insurance continuation. (Retroactive to March 1.) (The previous two times that I contacted the company this past week, they told me to wait for the company to do a thing. Today, they told me that the thing I was waiting for isn’t even possible in their system.) Then I had a pretty good therapy session; much to think about.
Rushed off to the Repair Cafe event in Saratoga. I took my nonworking Waterpik to see if they could repair it.
(They turn out to be one of those organizations that requires you to sign something saying that you’ve read their conditions, but they don’t show you the conditions unless you ask for them, at which point they have to spend some time finding them, sigh.)
The volunteer who helped me got the Waterpik taken apart, but had some trouble troubleshooting after that; another volunteer, better-versed in the ways of electrical devices, came over and helped; eventually the second person concluded that one or more parts of the motor weren’t working. By which point we had run out of time, so I packed up the disassembled parts and headed out. I might ask Kam to help poke at it further, or I might give up.
On the way out, I saw a Blendid machine—a fully automated smoothie kiosk, with a robot arm. Even though I was in a bit of a rush, I decided to try it out, figuring the robot arm would make the smoothie pretty quickly; but no, it ended up taking something like 5 minutes after I finished placing my order, mostly because of the long wait while the bins of strawberry pieces and banana pieces slowly sprinkled bits of fruit into the blender. The smoothie ended up tasting okay but not excellent. If at some point I happen across another robot-smoothie kiosk that has flavors I like better, and I have time for it, I might try it again, but otherwise once was enough.
Then I rushed off to deliver some papers. Backstory: my colleague Sara was one of the first technical writers at Google. In her first couple of years there (c. 2003-2005), she documented a bunch of stuff about Google’s servers. And she took notes, on paper, about that documentation.
Sara died of cancer in 2014. At the time, I was her officemate and the only person who reported to her, so I boxed up her work stuff, including all of her notebooks—about five 80-page spiral-bound notebooks.
I didn’t have any idea what to do with those notebooks, so they came with me through the next many office moves, and when I switched to remote work in 2020, I brought them home with me. They’ve been sitting in a box at home ever since.
About three weeks ago, as I was preparing to leave Google again, I finally got around to contacting an internal tech-writers mailing list to ask if anyone wanted these papers, or had any ideas about what to do with them. (I looked through them first; they were almost entirely about stuff she was working on. I didn’t see anything obviously personal in them, and nothing that was of particular interest to me personally.) I was expecting to be told to take them to a Google office and shred them.
Instead, I got a few nice emails from other writers (including Sara’s college roommate, who I hadn’t known of before) saying they hoped I found something good to do with the papers, and two emails from writers who are working on things related to what Sara worked on. They said they would take the papers and decide what to do with them.
So this afternoon I stopped by a Google building and dropped off Sara’s notebooks. It was really nice to be able to hand them off to someone who will respect them and find something reasonable to do with them.
After that, I headed to Home Depot to look at sheers. I’m finally working on getting window treatments for one of my windows at home that hasn’t had any sort of covering since the blinds stopped working many months ago. I’ve been looking at sheers online, but there are a lot of variables and I wasn’t really sure how various things worked, so I figured looking at them in person would help.
I wasn’t planning to buy anything, but I saw a curtain rod that I really liked, and then I found inexpensive sheers that will do as a stopgap until I find ones that I really like, so I bought all of that.
(The window will also get a blackout roller shade; I’ve ordered that, but it won’t arrive for a couple weeks.)
Then it was time to go pick up prescriptions. CVS has been texting me every day for the past week or two to tell me that my prescriptions are ready; but I’m temporarily in that weird only-quasi-insured space where my old insurance is officially over and COBRA hasn’t yet retroactively kicked in. Soon, I will have been insured for the past two weeks, but at the moment I’m not.
But CVS said that today was the last day they would hold the prescriptions, so I went in to pick them up.
And discovered that because I don’t have insurance, instead of the usual $0-$5 that I copay for these meds, one was $50 and the other was $100.
The pharmacist kindly spent several minutes searching on the computer for some indication of my insurance status, but eventually couldn’t. But they agreed to hold onto the meds for another week while I wait for the COBRA insurance info to reach me.
So I’ll go back and pick up the prescriptions when COBRA kicks in.
And while I was at CVS, I got some dental floss and some eye drops.
And on my way to my car, I saw a person sitting inside the parking structure, in ragged clothes and surrounded by what looked like their possessions. I often don’t offer money to people unless they explicitly ask, because it can be embarrassing for them and to me if I offer money to someone who isn’t looking for it; but this time, I got over that and I offered them some money and they accepted it.
And then I came home, and that was a lot of day! I still have various things on my to-do list for today (including a co-working session), but I feel like I’ve done a lot today. …Well, semi-done; only a couple of those tasks were fully completed, but at least I made some progress on several of them.