Annual Enrollment

We received this notice from John's company, but their list of what we needed to do involved watching some meaningless and condescending animated videos and calling the Employee Service Center if I had questions. Since the ESC has been outsourced like many other functions, they have been fairly diligent about providing as few answers as possible while also striving to provide the lowest level of service. So I made my own more realistic list of what we needed to do while choosing benefits.

1. Pour a big glass of wine, and keep the bottle close by.
2. Attempt to log on to the benefits site with the username and password that you carefully recorded after last year's confusion.
3. Discover that the ESC has reset everyone's passwords this year, but their instructions on how to log in don't work because they have confused social security numbers with employee id numbers. 
4. Log on to the benefits site once you have cleared the first hurdle. Decide to treat this like a video game in which you are on a quest.
5. Finish the first glass of wine now that you can actually see how much the premiums have increased for medical insurance. 
6. Pour yourself a second glass of wine.
7. Search for a way to simply choose a medical plan and adjust our Health Savings Account contribution without listening to and watching the inane accompanying animated videos featuring Alex. This guy is the Clippy of Annual Enrollment.
8. Resolve to sit through Alex's videos and personal questions, while wondering why some good coding couldn't automatically retrieve that information from HR. Take a sip of wine every time he chirps "Got it!" and "Understood" and two sips for "Your call!" when Alex is clearly not happy with your answer.
9. Rejoice in the ability to finally choose a medical plan, adjust the Health Savings Account contribution, and anxiously press "Confirm". Finish wine.
10. Be very grateful that even though this process was a bit aggravating and expensive, we have health insurance and the ability to pay for it. These are big things and not to be taken for granted.

Thanks, Alex!