HR

I once made a change to my insurance, a tiny little change that seemed more or less insignificant in that it didn’t affect my coverage but would cause my premiums—already pretty low, now that I was employed by the state—to be cut in half, all through some accounting trick my wife’s new employer, a second state agency, had explained to her when she was filling out her new hire paperwork. Of course, because I was an employee of the state, I couldn’t deal directly with the insurance company, a corporation with its headquarters in one of the obscurer states; these kinds of changes, I was told, were the business of a third state agency, one whose sole function was to administer the various benefits—health insurance, life insurance, retirement, etc.—offered to employees of the state. The woman I spoke to on the phone was very solicitous: She told me where to go online to find the form—No, she said, wait, you need to fill out two forms—the two forms I had to fill out (I was also supposed to keep a copy for my records), and even very kindly gave me the address—it was on the forms too, of course, as I saw right away, but it seemed somehow impolite to tell her so—where, she said, I should mail the forms once I’d filled them out. Just before I thanked her a fourth time—she kept asking me if there was anything else she could help me with before she’d finished helping me with the one thing I’d called to ask her to help me with—she told me about a third form, one she said I would not find online and which could not be filled out by me in any case, but which would have to be initiated by my employer’s human resources department, and which would result in the state division of payroll issuing a refund for the difference in the premiums I would be paying as a result of this change and what I had already paid, in advance, for the following month’s coverage. Because I could not understand what she was talking about, and because I had to get back to work, I forgot all about contacting HR and asking them to initiate this form until maybe a week later, when I’d found myself lost looking for a coworker’s house (holiday party) and I saw a sign for Bayview Road. I suddenly remembered the phone call: When the helpful woman read the address to me, she’d pronounced the word bayou like bay you or else maybe bay view; I’d thought she was saying Bayview until she spelled it out, at which point I realized she couldn’t possibly be from this state—bayou was such a common word here that it wasn’t merely that she couldn’t be from this state, but that, really, she couldn’t possibly have spent any time whatsoever in this state. When I spoke to HR, they informed me that the forms I had filled out should really have been filled out by them, that is, by HR, and that this other form, the one that would refund me the money I’d already paid, didn’t exist, there was no such form (though I would later be told, by someone else in HR, that in fact such a form did exist; because I hadn’t known exactly what it was called, the person I’d spoken to earlier thought I was asking about a form that didn’t exist). While I waited for the woman from HR to come back on the line, staying on hold only because I’d finally gotten through to an actual human being (one who’d immediately put me on hold), I saw, on the television, Capitol police dragging men and women in wheelchairs out of a hearing, followed by six or seven people recording the event on their phones, while my phone, on speaker, came to the end of the song it had been playing, announced that someone would be with me shortly, and then started playing the same song again, kind of staticky.

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