That was easy [NOT 4/2/24]

4/2/24 brightersideoflife 24

Hi, friends! I hope your weekend has been good!

Do you have anything recently that was easy to do? Like, surprisingly easy?

I switched car and home insurance recently and I was like ugggghhhh cancelling the old policy is going to be such a pain. There will probably have to be phone calls. Who even was my agent? I set this up 5 years ago!

Turns out I could do it all online, took like 3 clicks per policy. Now I feel a little sheepish for not doing it sooner!

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24 Comments

  1. I was anxiously waiting for 9am to sign my kid up for summer camp. Apparently it fills up immediately. It took less than 5min to do and there were no glitchy issues. Yay summer child care taken care of.

      • Try getting your kids into one of the screened/exam schools in Manhattan. That pretty much starts at birth. The public schools here are so shitty. If you’re connected you can squeeze them into one of the private schools but the tuition alone is $60,000 a year, and the extra-curricular fundraising is relentless.

        • There are a bunch of really good public schools in NYC, but they tend to have super restrictive neighborhood boundaries or else are charters.  So a lot of kids are served well, but then things happen like new boundaries are drawn due to overcrowding, or parents move and find the old school isn’t practical, and kids get bounced.

          What also happens is schools will essentially get redlined. So while Bronx Science has the cachet and alumni pool to get its grads into top colleges on a par with private schools like St. Anns, other high schools don’t have the same advantages and their grads get tossed in the same pool as reform school dropouts from Oklahoma, no matter that they had a really great education.

        • Do you remember I told you about how Better Half and I wanted to adopt these twin girls but we got turned down because the girls were Black, and so is Better Half, and so was the [be polite Mattie]  social worker who conducted the home inspection, but I am not. While we were sitting around I offered her a drink, and she looked at me like I had offered her a hit of fentanyl. A lot of Black women belong to Evangelical sects and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who knows why.

          So we got talking about schooling. I said, “There’s no way I’d put them in PS [whatever; the local school.] All they do over there is get into knife fights and deal drugs to each other. I don’t want to be a grandfather to my 14-year-old daughter’s child. No, there’s a charter school two blocks east of us, and failing that there’s a parochial school right on the next block, and the tuition’s pretty reasonable.”

          I’m sure that didn’t endear me to the NYC public-sector lifer.

        • As a former NYC public school student and current NYC public school parent, I need to delurk to defend the honor of my city’s schools. Cousin Matthew, with all due respect to your amazing storytelling skills (I’ve enjoyed reading your comments since the days of Gawker, Jezebel, and the old Groupthink), I beg you to stop repeating what you’ve heard from the New York Post (which is trash) and the type of rich snobs who have never even set foot into a NYC public school building because they don’t want their precious spawn anywhere the “rabble” who are the actual beating heart of our city.

          There are plenty of good schools here, and not just the famous ones people have heard about like Bronx Science. Don’t get me wrong, there are bad schools, the DOE makes plenty of terrible decisions, and even in my kids’ high-performing schools there are things I am not happy with. There is inequity in the system that is shocking, which is the real issue people should be complaining about. But the entire system isn’t garbage and you absolutely do not need to put your child in a $60k/year private school for them to get educated. You put your kid in those schools if you want them exclusively around other rich kids so they (and you) can be networking from age five while not having to rub shoulders with the kids of all the people who make your life possible, like your nanny, cleaning lady, doorman, taxi driver, and food deliverymen.

          My sixth grader reads at a ninth grade level, got the highest possible raw score on the math state exam last year, and is on his school’s robotics team– and this is all thanks to his “shitty” New York public school education at regular neighborhood schools.

          Don’t even get me started on support for kids with special needs (which my aforementioned high-achieving son also is). If you’re in that category, forget about private or charter (unless it’s a school specifically for special needs kids that likely costs $100k/year)– they won’t help you because they will do whatever they need to to preserve the myth that they are superior to public schools. This includes “counseling out” kids who need specialized help and are therefore too difficult and expensive for these so-called superior schools to educate. The “shitty” New York public schools serve everyone and offer support equal to or better than pretty much any public school system in the country.

          • Hi Stanz:

            Listen, you’re right, you’re absolutely right, but so many of them are just failing the kids so badly. And it’s so obvious and no one’s really doing anything except eliminating testing and social promoting.

            There’s the famously good one on the Upper West Side, but when they wanted to expand the “catchment area” (I think that’s what it’s called; you’d know better than I) to take in that large housing development around Lincoln Center (you know, the one behind it to the west) suddenly…that didn’t go smoothly. I know a couple of parents  who were involved in that. There’s also the one in Greenwich Village but I don’t know from where they would draw in the kids that would be so objectionable.

            At the time, and I don’t want to doxx myself any more than I have over the years, our polling place was a public high school. My current polling place is a public high school. But in the old place we took over—I don’t know what it was, because the school didn’t have a gym, so they’d block off the street in front of the school—and you could kind of wander around. I happened to be there when the classes were switching and that was a tough crowd.

            This was a long time ago, like thirty years ago. I was thinking about the girls, and the line for my polling booth was very long, and this discussion broke out among actual parents who were comparing horror stories about this school and yanking their kids out, to the charter or the parochial school.

            I foolishly thought I’d gain points with the social worker by demonstrating what an involved father I wold be, helping with the homework and attending the parent-teacher conferences, but apparently I had the opposite effect.

  2. To get back into a streaming account that had booted my tablet, I “only” had to bug my wife for the password and then bug her to dig out the phone for the temporary pass code for the two factor authentication, because of course this needs as much security as a 401K.

    • To access my bank account online I have to enter my username and password, and then they text me a security code, which sometimes doesn’t go through but if it does I then have to enter it. I just want to check my balance every so often, so I’ve tried calling them, and you get into this hellscape spiral of “Press 2 if…”

  3. its getting on for 3 am….

    suspect calling in sick when i wake will be surprisingly easy

    yo work….i cant do you today! im with my side piece!

    oh fuck she heard me!

    send help

  6. Something easy I’ve been avoiding? Finding a dentist. I have a root canal that needs doing but no one around me takes the (pathetic) dental insurance that I have. I know I just need to get on the phone and start asking, but I don’ wanna!

  7. It’s February and I have to start reserving campsites for freaking July. It’s online, it’s not hard, and I’m procrastinating, which I’m sure I will regret. The biggest pain is getting buy-in from folks with whom I will be camping.

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