Dancing Lessons Are Not Considered Health Care

I was just perusing my HSA's List of Allowable (and not allowable) Health Care Expenses to see what all I've been paying for out of pocket that I don't actually have to (like contact solution!). I came across a few that I found rather amusing...

• Dancing lessons: Not Qualified. Who thought dancing lessons would be covered as a health expense? Why, because it's aerobic exercise? Well then you better throw curling lessons on the list, too! And Wii Fit!
  
• Circumcision (non-infant): Not Qualified. Sorry, Abraham wannabes, unless you're eight days old, you're out of luck. Talk about adding insult to injury.
• DNA testing for paternal responsibility: Not Qualified. You know what is qualified though? Birth control. So are vasectomies. I wonder how many people upon learning that think "I sure wish I knew that last year".
• Experimental Drugs: Qualified. But only if obtained legally. I'm clearly thinking of the wrong kind of experimental drugs.
• Marijuana: Not Qualified. Ah, there we go.
• Smoking Program: Qualified. What's a smoking program? A program that's on fire? They're clearly not talking about a program for smoking marijuana. Maybe this is like a cigar club or something. If so, sign me up - I'm qualified!
  

Brinkster Customer Service Fail

A few months ago, I blogged about how "great" my web hosting company, Brinkster, is. Apparently they thought this faint praise was sincere, because they're back at it. I went to listen to some briTunes this afternoon and was met with a very generic parser error screen. Real lovely. Turns out this was true of all of the pages. I just visited the site last night and hadn't made any changes since, so I knew the error wasn't on my end.

I checked my email to see if I was notified of any outages, which was a waste of 40 seconds because that's not how Brinkster rolls. They view service issues as a way to increase site traffic (who cares if it's pissed off site traffic, right?) so they make you log in, chat with customer support and let them tell you condescendingly that the site is down for maintenance via this link. Sorry, guys, didn't realize that one of the requirements of being your customer was to check the Brinkster news page every hour to see if my site might be down. Ever hear of email?

Additionally, if my site is going to be down for 24 hours (which it was last time...we're approaching 12 this time), it should, at the very least, be set up to redirect to a nice, clean, plain-English page explaining that the site is currently down because of Brinkster's lousy servers and not because of me, the customer (even better if it provides a link to the news post). It's bad enough that the site is down, to throw some nondescript parser error message at you is inexcusable.

Unfortunately, explaining these ideas to customer support feels like explaining capitalism to a squirrel. They can nod* and pretend they understand that you want something in return for what you gave them, but really they don't care because they already have your nuts.

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* the computer senses this nodding and outputs "I have noted that for you" as a result

Griffey and Catheters

What do those have in common? For now, they are merely topics from the same doughnut meeting at my workplace. That's right, work here and you'll get to munch on a tasty treat while discussing topics such as kitty litter, bunk beds, toilets, and beer. All in the same meeting! (Not necessarily in that order, though). If that's not a pitch for the company, I don't know what is. Unfortunately, we're not really hiring right now. Sucks for you.