Geek. Pirate. Mom

Last week I mentioned that I once worked for Scientologists.

At the time, I didn’t know a lot about them. Just that they had the Celebrity Centre in LA and that it was founded by LRH who also wrote scifi. I knew that they were regarded as a cult, but hadn’t delved into that very deeply.

I was a temp at the time, looking for long term work, and had an interview with the Doctor’s Wife, who ran the front office. But their current front office girl was taking over as Office Manager, which is why they needed me. I knew nothing about insurance, but mentioned that I’m a quick learner. I was skilled with office type programs, and my Disneyland past told her everything she needed to know about whether or not I could be appropriate with patients.

The pay was much more than I’d been making at Disney, so I jumped at the chance.

I would work from 9-6, and once a week there’d be an inter-office meeting for one half of the day while the Doctor did something. I honestly don’t remember- I know that he taught a class for awhile, and I think he also went to visit dental offices. But he wasn’t there.

I was taken around and introduced to the staff. There were the boyfriend and girlfriend who handled all the insurance claims- a very clean cut, all American type couple. The gorgeous girl who spoke with the patients about their coverage, and who apparently would assist the doctor if needed (though there were two assistants for the procedures). Oh, and the girl who was fresh from college who handled the marketing. And the new office manager.

In retrospect, the fact that they had an in-house marketing person should have told me something odd was going on.

At the first weekly meeting, I was handed pages that were photocopied from a workbook and asked to fill them out. The wording was odd, and I really didn’t see what any of it had to do with an office- they were asking about personal goals, if anyone stood in the way of them. At the bottom of the page, a company name was mentioned. I googled it, and it was essentially the non-Church company that puts out materials for Church members to incorporate in the rest of their lives.

I said nothing about any of this. It was a well paying job, and the people there were pretty nice. And weirdly, it was sort of entertaining to be fielding calls from the Celebrity Centre to set up class times for the Doctor’s Wife.

But things were weird. They kept track of how much money they brought in weekly, and tried to improve on that. So they would never turn away emergency patients. So I’d work a lot of long hours, and listen to the marketing girl be chastised for not convincing enough offices to refer patients. Since occasionally I was discussing procedures with patients, I was given a script to use if local CoS members came in- since most wouldn’t want to use anesthesia.

They fired her. And brought in a large man who smelled. I knew most of the staff in the front offices (since they would call when referring us emergency patients) and more than a few admitted that they didn’t like him. As it turned out, the assistants, the pretty girl (who wound up leaving to become a pharmacy rep) and the office manager were the only non-Scientologists in the place.

Then they decided to send our Office Manager for “training” classes in Hollywood. Where she took a course and yes… was audited at the end. And because she thought it was bull, she had to retake the course. And when she didn’t want to retake it for a third time, they fired her. She’d been looking into it to see if she had a legal case for being fired- since these weren’t exactly training courses, they were technically courses related to their religious beliefs. I don’t know how that turned out.

I was there for a little over a year. I’m not sure why I stuck around so long- okay, I do. About 9 months in, my wisdom teeth started to come in. They took an x-ray, and he offered to take all four out for free. So he took them out, and I stuck around for another few months.

The job wasn’t all bad. I learned about how insurance works. I got the wisdom teeth out for free. I know about dental implants now, and saw a jaw reconstruction surgery. And if the Doctor got his way, once a month he’d drop in and show us pictures from procedures. I loved those meetings. (He and I would eat popcorn during them)

And I got a crash course in Scientology.

Over the weekend we had a planned power outage, and this is the full story. Mistakes and all.

I also talk a little about my writing, and call myself an idiot.

As a bonus, here’s my first cosplay progress video.

It’s Abaddon from Supernatural. If you don’t watch the show (you should), this is what she looks like

When I wear the cosplay to conventions, I’ll be doing this makeup to the left- but I had to see how the regular makeup test would work.

And I’m really happy with how it turned out. I honestly am.

If you like my vlogs, consider subscribing to my YouTube channel, and please hit like on my vids! Have a good weekend!

Earlier this week, I was browsing my Tumblr dash, and came across this post:

And if you look at the tags on the bottom, you’ll see what happened. I read it, and realized that I had a friend that was a soulmate. Someone who got me to the very core, who I didn’t have to say much of anything to- but did. We chatted constantly.

Jerad.

And while I have a lot of wonderful new friends, there’s still the hole that he left in my life. It’s not as big as it used to be- so many other things used to bring up raw grief that would literally force me to curl in on myself and sob. But it’s still there.

It isn’t as though this hits me when I think of something sad. It’s the happy memories that hit the hardest- make me miss him the most. Things he would have liked. Imagining the guilt trip he’d give me for screwing around on the internet instead of writing (he really supported my writing). Fond things like that post above. Memories of someone who understood me- the good and the bad.

I still wonder what if. Which is a horrible thing to do when you’ve lost someone, but inevitable if you’re me. That’s my job as a writer, wondering. So I let myself consider it, beat myself up over not being able to save him (though I know that I did all I could do) and I pick myself up and move on.

And then write about it.

Remember Telephone? That ridiculous game where one end of a line would say something like ‘pretty nice day’, and by the time it would get to the other end it would turn into ‘purple monkey dishwasher.’

For the last month of so, I’ve been playing this game with our insurance company. It started when I was getting bills from the company that handled my blood tests, sending statements that said that they were waiting to hear back from my insurance company.

So I called. Read in my identification number, said my birthdate (only for it to ask if I was born in 1918), and in desperation started shouting “Representative.” Aren’t voice systems fun?

And that’s when I found out a month ago, that somehow the insurance through my husband’s work had gotten the idea that we had dual insurance. You know, with the insurance from his previous employer. I talked to a very nice lady, and she corrected all of the claims. All 16 of them.

I got a phone call from my hematologist’s office asking about the issue, and called the insurance company back. The woman put a note in my file that I did NOT have dual coverage.

Yesterday I got a phone call from my gastroenterologist’s office informing me that they were running into the same problem. So I called back. Turns out that second woman? Put a note in my file saying that I DID have dual insurance and would send them the information.

I’m not sure how my I don’t have dual insurance turned into all that.

Hopefully this is all taken care of. I don’t mind calling to straighten it out. The woman at my GI’s office was more than surprised that I called the insurance as soon as I got off the phone with her to help straighten it out (she called me today to see if I’d called, to avoid calling them before I’d straightened it out). Which makes me a little sad. Are people really so lazy that they’d avoid taking care of these things?

Strangely, phone calls to my insurance company doesn’t fall under the category of things that trigger my anxiety. But I’m going to attribute that to calling to verify benefits back when I worked for the Oral Surgeon that was a Scientologist.

But I’m getting away from the point of all of this. How, if you work for a company that records calls for quality whatever, how can you possible manage to enter a note that goes completely against what was discussed?

I’m tired of playing telephone.

Note: Yes, I did work for a Scientologist. Yes, it was as weird as you would think.

It’s Vlog #6 – And this time I’m talking about what I use to stay connected on the go! (Because really, I’m mildly addicted to my phone and spend a lot of time away from outlets)

These are the two items I mention:

HyperJuice Micro – made by HyperShop, http://www.hypershop.com
ChargeCard – http://www.chargecardproject.com

These are my own personal reviews. I bought these items on my own, put them through the ringer in my real life… they get the actual Geek Pirate Mom seal of approval. No compensation here. Just me sharing stuff that I liked.

Over the weekend it was announced that Matt Smith would be leaving Doctor Who, and while I can’t say that I’m surprised (he has had a long run), I am both happy and sad.

Happy that Matt Smith’s career has taken off (because Doctor Who has proved how immensely talented he is), and sad because he was my first Doctor.

That isn’t quite true. I’d caught an episode or two of Nine and Ten, but hadn’t really started watching the show. I started with him and was immediately taken in by the ancient man who sometimes acted like an 5 year-old.

Doctor Who was something I shared with my best friend Jerad, and he died before the first Smith Christmas Special aired (which I still can’t see without being reminded that it was something we’d both been looking forward to, and was the first thing I had to experience without him). And the more I watched the Eleventh Doctor, the more I realized that he wasn’t just dear to me because he was my first Doctor. It was because… he was like Jerad. Jerad was clever and kind, but incredibly hard on himself. He used humor to mask the pain he felt inside, and…

I’m getting sidetracked. Even with all my attachments to Eleven- and I suspect that I will be a sobbing mess because it will be like losing Jerad all over again, I’m still looking forward to the future. Because it’s the nature of the show. We know that each end is a new beginning. That companions come and go, and that the same is true of the Doctor.

I hope that Doctor Who is ready to take the next step. In the grand scheme of the series, we’ve only had a couple of non-white companions, and there absolutely zero regenerations have been a POC or woman. Considering the show has explained that other Time Lords have regenerated as a different gender, and certainly, Melody Pond regenerated as a black girl to become Mels- there’s no canon saying it couldn’t happen.

It would be fantastic, too. The Doctor would be treated differently as a woman or a person of color, and that would be amazing story-wise, seeing a character we’re so familiar with actually have to grapple with how the Universe treats someone else. And it isn’t as though the show would actually change its focus. S/He would still be running around saving people hunting things. Just seeing it all from a slightly different place.

What are your thoughts on Matt Smith leaving? Or are you waiting until the Anniversary special to even start processing it?

I was supposed to put up a blog post, yesterday. I’m not entirely sure what happened, but somehow I forgot. (But I’m in the middle of writing something for the novel, so that might be part of it)

Here is this week’s vlog, where the Little Kidlet wanted to stay hello, and didn’t exactly leave. And somehow I still managed to talk about something other than him.

If you have anything to say about the vlog, just drop me a line here and there- and if you have any questions, if I get enough I’ll do a Q&A!

Have a good weekend!

Memorial Day always seems to be the first weekend of summer, even though the Oldest Kidlet still has a couple weeks left of his school year.

And ours was packed. There was a graduation party for Brother-in-law’s girlfriend. TheBoy and I went to a Dodgers game. And yesterday, the boys went across the street and ran through the sprinklers with a neighbor.

While I was talking with my neighbor, we started to talk about how kids don’t play the way you used to. (Yes, I know, I was talking with someone. I’m proud of me, too) And it’s true. When I was a kid, it was totally normal to shove your kids outside so that they could run around the neighborhood as a pack. My sister and I weren’t all that old and we’d ride around in front of our house (we lived in a condo development where there was an oval sidewalk with a big grassy area- so we would just ride in an oval for hours). By the time we were in fourth and fifth grade, we were spending all our time in the alley playing with the other kids (including the bicycle rodeo where we tried to knock over a GIANT pylon). Even when I was in high school and was the oldest kid in our new neighborhood, we had giant water fights.

You don’t see it all that often these days, though. When the neighbor showed up at the door to ask if the Oldest Kidlet could come over and play, I did a double take. People make play dates now (how I loathe the term) instead of just asking if kids can come over. It’s all structured and boring. This were little kids running through a sprinkler and then shooting each other with a water gun.

And it was fantastic, watching the kids play the way that I used to- and both of the boys are excited at the prospect of a summer filled with days like that.

So here’s to the lazy days of summer!

If you’ve been following the news, you probably heard that the Boy Scouts decided to allow gay children into the organization. Yay, right?

It’s still not enough for me to let my boys join.

The Boy Scouts of America still won’t let openly gay adults serve as leaders/volunteers. While the BSA say it’s because it wasn’t under consideration (they were only deciding about children)- I’m going to say that’s just a line fed by PR.

Why? There is no reason that they couldn’t have or wouldn’t have debated the situation in order to make the Boy Scouts of America all-inclusive- making the decision for members should have led to a discussion about leadership. I applaud them for providing an environment where boys who are out can feel comfortable, but I’m not sure how much it means if gay adults aren’t there as well. And I applaud them for standing up to the groups that were speaking in favor of keeping openly gay children out. Doing the right thing can be tough, but I still think they have further to go to live up to what the Boy Scouts are supposed to stand for.

We still live in a world where people commonly assume that homosexuality is linked to pedophilia- and don’t tell me it isn’t true. If you hear about a gay priest, immediately people will start wondering whether or not they’re a danger to children in the church. No, really.

Not to mention that it’s a pretty odd message to send to teens in the Boy Scouts. Congrats, you’re gay and you are accepted as a Boy Scout. But grow up? You can’t continue to help us as a leader or volunteer.

Sexual orientation has nothing to do with being a role model for the youth of tomorrow. So I think I’ll hold off on throwing the BSA a parade until adults are welcome, too. Maybe I’ll send cookies.

Can you believe it’s Thursday already?

In this week’s Vlog, I’m talking headaches, epiphanies about writing process and I might be a little delirious.