Friday began at twenty to four in the morning, and not well.
A colleague had dental work Thursday — "apparently one of the most painful things ever" — and asked me to run her client call that evening, since she'd be on voice only. "I can handle it," I told her. At half past eleven she wrote, "Are you hopping on?"
I was asleep.
I found the message at 3:38 a.m. and typed the only thing there was: "I can't believe I literally hung you out to dry. I'm really sorry." She'd run the call herself, alone, mouth full of novocaine. Her reply: "It's no problem! I told them I would double check everything with you, but it was all good."
So that was me at four in the morning, apologizing into the dark to a woman who had just done my job for me, in pain, and done it fine. Hold that thought. It turned out to be the theme of the weekend.
At noon Friday I did the best thing I've done all month, and it took about four minutes. If you read the last one of these, you know the claims war — the fifty grand where nobody ever said no. One reason the file crawls: the insurer won't discuss my partner's claims with me. She's an adult; I'm just the guy with the spreadsheet. Thursday night they finally sent the authorization form that fixes that. Friday I filled in every field myself, then sent it to her needing exactly one thing: a signature. By late afternoon she'd signed it, sent it in herself, and replied to me with one word: "done."
Three months of being the bottleneck on her own money, closed in an afternoon — not because anyone tried harder, but because her part had been shrunk to one signature. The version where I ask her to "deal with the insurance form" dies in a folder. The version that arrives finished gets done between two other things.
Meanwhile the clinic from last time — the one that only exists by fax, three fax numbers for one receipt — wrote back to say they have no record we were ever there. At all. A very kind employee had escalated to the managers of two other branches, hunting a visit that officially never happened. The punchline: that claim had already been filed and paid, about $400, while the faxes were still in the air. I wrote back, thanked her, told her to close the enquiry, and apologized for the trouble. Politeness costs nothing and I will need that fax machine again.
My dad's 7 a.m. scam forward arrived on schedule. He collects them for the thing I'm building. The collection grows.
Saturday I took off. Properly off — no screens, all day, day five of solo-parenting three kids at my parents' place. The eight-year-old, the six-year-old, the little one, and nothing on any calendar.
While I was off, the assistant system I've been wiring up worked from midnight to midnight and, by its own count, needed thirty minutes of me. Its morning audit came back with seven stuck items, and every one of them was the same shape: a thing waiting on a person. Not on money. Not on a ruling from some office. On a person. One of them is waiting on me — a one-sentence answer I keep not giving. Saturday was day three.
And it found a receipt. There's a passport renewal fee I'd budgeted a morning in line to go pay, about eighty dollars. Turns out I paid it fifteen months ago. The confirmation has been sitting in my own inbox the whole time, filed where nobody looked, least of all me. I was about to pay a fee twice for the privilege of standing at a counter. Last time I wrote that deals don't die of "no," they die of one missing page. Update from the field: sometimes the page isn't missing. It's filed. You just never looked.
One thing for anyone who moves paper for a living. Every deal of mine that ever stalled "in underwriting" was not in underwriting. It was on a person's desk, and that person needed one thing nobody had made easy. You can chase them, or you can shrink their part to one signature and watch three months clear in an afternoon. A woman with novocaine in her jaw and a one-word email settled it for me, twice in two days.
School starts Tuesday. The health forms for all three kids are still not filed — three logins, three minutes each. They are, of course, waiting on a person. I'll let you guess which one.