Lots Of Bad Words In This One

Timeline:

4/28: My father dies.  I contact local insurance/investment agent to inform him of this fact.  My folks liked this guy and he liked them - he said some nice things, blessed me, shit like that.  I didn't have to call him so quickly but I'm a guy and I'm happier when I'm doing something, preferring any action to sitting with my grief.

5/19:  Follow-up with local agent.  Leave a VM.  This guy will henceforth and forevermore be referred to as Guy Who's Pissing Me Off, or GWPMO (pronounced GWOMP-mo).

5/20:  GWPMO replies that he has been in touch my sister. This is despite the fact that I'm the executor of the estate and we explained to him that I should be the first point of contact - part of the reasoning here is that my sister did so much work when dad was alive that I wanted to offload some of the paperwork stuff, which is a specialty of mine.  Also, I think that a lot of men zero in on a woman assuming that she's going to be the weak link - that's where they start if they want to delay, dissemble, obfuscate.  I don't have proof that this is so but I've never let facts get in the way of my paranoid, suspicious ramblings.  Says that he has an appointment scheduled with her to discuss matters.  My sister comments that she doesn't have no stinking appointment.

5/21: I contact GWPMO by EM thanking him for calling back (choking on some bile) while reminding him that he needs to start with me.  I was nice.  Really.  

5/25:  GWPMO calls my sister to set up the appointment and remind her that he needs the Death Certificate.  At this point I'm beginning to work up some begrudging respect or burgeoning pity for GWPMO.  He's either plowing forward doggedly or he's brain-damaged and doesn't understand simple, basic instructions spoken in unadorned English.  Either way he's not veering off the path that he has chosen.

5/25: I return call to GWPMO in short order to find out that he's out of town and that he's going to be out of town for several days - he had actually called my sister from the road.  I don't dig on this fact.  I don't care where he's going to be or what he's going to be doing - he is the representative of a huge corporation and they can fucking well get someone else to help me in his absence.  I ponder remarking - but do not - that I bet they'd have someone jonny-on-the-spot if I wanted to invest the same amount of money that I wanted to withdraw.

"Oh, sure," I wanted to say.  "You're good at taking the money.  Big deal.  Anybody can take the money.  (Here I would flutter my hands around in the air, grabbing at unseen bills, to mimic a taking action).  But it's the paying out the money that's important for the client, now isn't it?"

I rejected this as too snarky.

5/27: GWPMO returns to office.  GWPMO does not call me.

5/31: My sister alleges that GWPMO has the Death Certificate.  I'll tell you this - nothing happens without the DC, which actually makes sense.  It must prevent lots of people calling insurance agents and saying someone is dead and they'd like their money now, please.

Another part of the delay was that the doctor or medical examiner or whoever is responsible for filling out DCs sent my father's DC to Hospice of The Old City.  Since he was never . . . you know . . . in Hospice this caused more delays.

6/2: I call GWMPO, who has maintained a flawless record of never, ever calling me back.  He's like 8-0 at this point.  He's got the upper hand.  He's throwing heat and he's backing me off the plate.  I've hit the dirt a couple of time, sent sprawling to get out of the way of a high and tight fastball.  I dig back in, though.  I'm a battler.  I'm a singles hitter.  I wear people out with my dogged, unimaginative persistence.  You knock me down a couple of times and then I zing one right back through the middle, hustle down to first base, clapping my hands.

GWPMO gives me two options: he'll help me fill out The Forms (TF, pronounced Th' Fuck) or I can find an agent in Vacation City, set up an appointment with him or her, and get help with the forms that way.  He does not offer any recommendations on any agents.

I ask him to send me the TF.  I'm bruised and battered, pissed off, brushing dirt off my uniform, licking blood off my lips, but I'm down the road with this cat, right?  I figure . . . some forms, right?  Oh, GWPMO sent me TF - pages and pages of indecipherable legalese that a powerful, connected scrivener would have been unable to decipher.  To my dogged credit, I make a start but get nowhere.  I'm sinking into quicksand, into a tar pit.  There are dinosaurs going down right next to me.  Thunder lizards are more resigned than I am.

6/3: I leave a VM with GWPMO asking for some assistance in finding someone local who can help me fill out all of these fucking forms.  I imagine him chuckling in a dark office, warming his hands over a fire made of furniture he has repossessed from destitute widows (for some reason he's gone from being an insurance agent to a collection agent).  He indicates he has contacted the Home Office, or THO (pronounced Th' Ho) to request that a local agent contact me.

Silence on all fronts.

6/7: EM to GWPMO, following up. 

6/8: Reply from GWPMO.  He has put in an "urgent request" to the THO for someone to contact me.

"What urgent request?" I grouse to SuperK.  "It's been five fucking weeks since my dad died. This is an INSURANCE COMPANY.  They PAY OUT INSURANCE TO PEOPLE WHO HAD PURCHASED INSURANCE POLICIES THAT PAY OUT WHEN THEY DIE.  I can't get anyone to do anything for me and all of a sudden my requests are 'urgent?' "

I mentioned that my father had died.

Nothing.  Crickets

6/9: Fuck this.  I call the THO.  I talk to Scott.  Scott is very nice.  I ask Scott if he can help me with TF.  

"Sure," Scott says.  "What forms do you need help with?"

I read some form numbers off TF that GWPMO has sent me.

"I don't have any record of those forms," Scott says.  "Maybe GWPMO sent you some old forms?  I can help you fill out the correct forms.  I'll put them in the mail today and you should have them in 5 to 7 business days."

I don't know what's more satisfying to my sense of absurdity here: that GWPMO has old forms - so old the THO doesn't have a fucking record of them or the numbers on them - or that the THO can't research the forms for me.  How old were these forms? I mean what would have happened if I had filled all of these forms out and sent them in? I imagine Scott throwing his hands up in the air: "What the hell are these?" he'd yell.  I can only assume they had a total rewrite of TF, and I mean a scrap-the-old-system, start-from-scratch, it's-a-new-day-at-this-organization kind of rewrite.

Or maybe they just changed the numbers and the forms were identical.

As a guy who is suspicious of the motives of large corporations on a good day I confess that at this point I was getting morbidly suspicious.

(My notes get a little fragmented here - I don't remember how I left it with Scott, that useless pustule.  I feel like I've been trapped in a small, confined, metal space and insurance agents have been tossing in concussion grenades.  My ears are ringing and I'm increasingly out of it).

6/10: I get up and research a list of local agents off of the interweb.  I pick one at random and call him.  I don't think that GWPMO or Scott are going to come through for me in the local rep research.  Surprisingly enough or maybe predictably this guy immediately agrees to see me and we set up an appointment for the next day.

(I am often refereeing an existential battle between manly action and patient waiting.  Usually patient waiting is the way to go but in this case - as you can clearly see - it has been a waste of time. Plunging rashly ahead has been the most productive).

6/11: I meet with this guy who I'll call Jeff.  Jeff has some of the forms from my father's estate but not all of them.  Frankly, I'm impressed that THO sent him anything.  Still, Jeff and I come up with a game plan which includes parting ways for a couple of days so that he can get all of TF pre-filled out as much as possible, thereby saving me time for the actual final filling-out of TF.  I'm vaguely uneasy about leaving Jeff's office without filling out TF.  It seems like I'm so close.

6/13: EM to Jeff where I lay out a generous schedule for the week.  
Silence.

6/15: EM to Jeff.
Silence.
Phone call to Jeff who says: "I got your emails."  I hate it when people say that pursuant to the fact that they haven't responded to the emails.  Jeff says: "I haven't filled TF out yet.  Let's set up an appointment."  He actually adds: "That'll force me to get them filled out."  I was impressed by his honesty - honesty where the subtext was: "Your shit isn't very important to me. I haven't filled TF because I've had more important, interesting things to do."

6/17: Appointment with Jeff.  When I walk into his office I see a 6 inch stack of paper on his desk.  He laughs and then says: "It's a lot of work for which I'm getting paid absolutely nothing." I may be making up the exact words that he spoke but not the sentiment.

Again, I'm impressed/floored/flabbergasted/infuriated that THO has no procedure for getting accounts transferred to new agents or for compensating them for the work this entails.  I'd suggest this as a company motto: "You better hope the guy who sells you this shit is around when you die.  And don't move, either."

Jeff actually looks surprised at the stack of papers.  I'm once again confounded that a task which would seem to be common and unsurprising to an employee is so surprisingly uncommon.

I'm smart enough to get a time frame from Jeff on the completion of the forms.  He provides the date of 6/19.

6/21: some factotum at his office calls me to get additional information on the filling-out of TF.  Jeff was way off with the 6/19 date.

6/23: seven weeks since my father died.