Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

It is official. I am against change.

Yes, I'm at that point in time in my life where I hate almost any sort of change that occurs. It is called being an old person.

It is not that all change is bad. It isn't. I remember a time when people smoked cigarettes everywhere, including doctors in operating rooms performing open heart surgery. If the second hand smoke made you cough or gave you cancer, it was because you are a weak person and you should just get over it. Now, a smoker can't smoke anywhere unless the smoker is smoking marijuana and he's in Colorado. It is like what Cedric The Entertainer said, "You can't smoke on earf no mo."

Back when I was a kid, there was basically three channels on TV and you had to get up from your chair and change the channels. Most of the shows back then were Westerns, like Bonanza, which was about a father trying to raise three sons in the old west with one of them being as old as he was, another one being as big as a dump truck, and the youngest one who was probably gay.

I guess you can say it is better now. We watch Kim Kardashian who is mainly known for being Kim Kardashian instead of Little Joe explaining to Hoss why he wears so much hair gel.

My problem with change is this: change always promises to be better. Nobody tries to be honest and sell change as It will be different , it will be worse and it will truly suck. No, change is always sold as the answer. The problem is always with the question it is supposedly answering.

During my life, there has been this constant mantra of change like it is a good thing. Sometimes the change has been mandated by the government, like Obamacare. Obamacare was sold as a change we were hoping for-we hoped for a time when health insurance was free like air and doesn't cost anything and there are no rules and everything is paid for at 100% and the doctor will look like Dr. McDreamy and he'll take all of the time necessary to cure my planters wart. Plus, he'll give me mint flavored birth control pills and make a Catholic Nun pay for it.

We (voters/taxpayers) were told that Obamacare was the answer to the serious question of how to insure uninsured people. It wasn't. It was the answer to this serious question: How can Barack Obama win an election and become The President of The United States?

At the workplace, it has been nothing but change, change, change. Again, some of it has been good. But a lot of it has been bad.

For some reason, and I've never been able to quite figure this out, but moving me to a different desk has been a major agent of change. "If we can move Alan from that desk to that desk, there's no telling what this company can do".   Of course, the desk moves have never been accompanied by a change in salary like an increase.

One change that gave me a headache was "empowerment". The company bigwigs said I was now "empowered" to do my job, that I was working at for ten years, powerlessly. That is, I was "empowered" to help solve a customer's problem without (and this is important) bothering anybody in leadership about a customer's problem because leadership was at a strategic two hour lunch.

Problem: this was a health insurance company and the only way to make a customer happy in health insurance is to pay their claims with no patient responsibility. The reality is some medical issues are not covered by medical insurance such as the time my company denied a lady's tattoo.

Now this wasn't a butterfly or a flower, etc. Rather, it was tattooing the nipple on her reconstructed breast to match the color of the nipple on her other breast. This was not covered by the insurance. Usually, that procedure is part of the "global fee" (i.e.: total cost) of a breast reconstruction and is not billed separately by  physicians because most humans want their nipples to match. For some unknown reason, this patient's physician apparently decided to give a discount to patients that didn't care if their nipples matched ("Matching Nipples" would be a great name for a band) and charged her for coloring (by tattoo) her nipple. This person wanted to speak to a supervisor or manager about this matter, however, I assured her that I was empowered to talk about her nipples. I never felt so dirty in my life.

My brother in law (speaking, ahem, on another topic, but you can apply it to this one) said, "Sometimes you just put your head down and hope for the best and it always ends up being the worst." That's really the best you can do with change- manage it. That doesn't mean you have to like it.