On Friday Afternoon...

(or ...
Am I Under Seige by Some Aliens Who Plan to Pummel Me with Paperwork in order to Activate My Secret Paper-Related Self Destruct Sequence that I Don’t Even Know About but am Beginning to Suspect I Might Have?)

On Friday afternoon, I ran to school to hang up some flyers for the reading series. Not having an hour to search for parking, I pulled into the drive, turned on my blinkers, and ran into the building. By my calculations, it was thirty seconds later that some one (Alien?) descended from nowhere (Mars?) and placed the piece of paper on my windshield. It was not a disposable piece of paper. It was a piece of paper requiring me to fill out another piece of paper, and threatening, should I resist, to hunt down and immobilize my vehicle (blameless in this, I might point out, vehicles lacking free will), and hold it ransom until I filed many more pieces of paper.

On Friday afternoon, I took my vehicle (and my ticket) to visit the office supply store to purchase a roll of special paper for my fax. (If your life is going well, in the paperwork department at least, you can exist without a fax. You can email, or make a phone call, and receive your bills in some range of a week or two after they are sent with no worries. However, if you have legal woes, or any agency has screwed up your identity, you also need a fax. I came home with my roll of fax paper (that didn’t fit) to find:

The third letter this week from a medical provider, wanting extra money for a past services, because our health insurance company, after taking our payments and issuing cards for the past 16 months, is now informing our providers that our coverage expired in June of 2005. No one at our employer’s office, the COBRA office or the Insurance company knows why this is happening.

An email from my tenant noting that as the contractors were “controlling” the water damage in the unit, they blew a fuse, and she now, along with holes in the walls, dissected plumbing, pulled up tile, and mutilated carpet, has no electricity in half the apartment, what should she do?

A phone message from the Insurance adjuster, explaining how my liability insurance won’t cover me for the damage to the unit below, unless they could prove I had been neglectful, or willfully caused the damage. Because I keep the unit in repair, the toilet flooding was “an accident” they will not pay. Had I hit a pipe with an axe and caused a flood, apparently I would be covered. In any case, nothing can be definitively determined until some papers are made available: copies of my policy, copies of the homeowners association policies, copies of estimates and invoices to date, and the results from the asbestos testing (positive). We are, apparently, waiting on these papers.

Taxes. Coming right around the corner.

My desk. Piled so high I have to think of somewhere else to go now.