To add to the further unpleasantness of my recent unpleasantness, unlike other bouts of unemployment, my health-insurance is being handled through my ex-company as opposed to the health-insurance company. Now, it's one thing to deal with a faceless insurance company (especially as I've gotten pretty good at BS'ing my way through insurance companies and know how long I can go without paying my bills before they get really snippy) it's another thing to deal with the people who put you in this mess to begin with.

So now I get mailings every month bearing the logo of my ex-company. And if a problem arises I have to get in touch with people at my ex-company, even to the point of having to maintain low-level contact with them. This despite the fact that there's a whole lot of other types of contact I'd like to do to some of them other than low-level communications (editor's note- the Legal Department has advised me to let everyone know that this is a figure of speech, a comic jape, a use of poetic license. I do not mean in any way shape or form that I want to physically hurt anyone at the company nor want any physical harm on anyone. Wish them all to die of slow, painful and torturous deaths after living a life of miserable existence, maybe). This also means that, like this month where I'm probably going to have to pay for my health insurance with a credit card, I have to give hints to those who messed up my life just how messed up my life is. Even worse, after messing up my life, since they are the one's who I have to go through to deal with my health insurance, they still, in a way, hold some degree of control over me.

No, the people who I have to deal with are not with my ex-boss nor any people I worked with directly, it's mainly with people in HR. That wouldn't be such a bad thing except for the fact I'm not particularly fond of the company's HR department. While I may have written (endlessly) about my inability to understand just what HR does considering how long they usually dawdle over dealing with anything relating to hiring people, I do know one thing about HR. When there's problems in a Department and the relationship between a boss and his/her underling is breaking apart as quickly and as viciously as that of Yugoslavia, HR is supposed to do something. They call people in for meetings, they ask what's up, they mediate. In other words, they're supposed to do something about it- it's supposedly in their job description. I know because I've been there. I've been in trouble at work, I've had problems with bosses, I've had the big meetings with HR. I even had to get all weepy in a meeting with the Senior VP of HR about how a fuck-up was caused due to having to deal with family B.S. involving a trip back home (yet another lesson in my new theory that I should never, ever go on vacation while holding a job because only bad things happen when I do). It may not have gotten me out of trouble but at least some of the "he's incompetant" feelings were replaced with "wow, that's pretty fucked up" feelings and it's always nice to hear a sympathetic "wow, that's pretty fucked up" every once in awhile.

In this case, I got nothing. While my boss suddenly turned into Dr. Jekyll and decided to take God knows what amount of job related and/or personal issues out on me and as I started to struggle under the weight of being yelled at several times a day, they did nothing. Not one meeting, not one mediation, not one asking of me what's up. And these are the people with whom I have to deal with everytime my healthcare bill is due.

This doesn't make me happy.