Tags
ACA, Affordable Care Act, Childhood, Complaining, Family, Health Insurance, healthcare.gov, Obamacare, Psychiatry, Psychology, Technical Difficulties
I was very excited after reading this article that Healthcare.gov now allowed you to cancel existing applications (for example, applications that had 5 husbands that even the advanced help team couldn’t remove) and start over.
So, while waiting for the cheese to melt for my dang quesadilla, I thought I’d quickly log on and then I could restart my application while eating lunch.
I entered my username and password. Nothing happened. The log-in page just refreshed. I thought, maybe I used my email as the username. Weird, but not unheard of for me. Doesn’t work, but at least I got an error message this time. I double check my registration email for the correct username. I was correct the first time, so I try the regular combination again. Nada. I know it’s not my password because I use the same basic one with easily memorized variations for almost everything. But I hit “reset password” anyways, because what else am I going to do?
I answer the first two security questions just fine. Then I get to the third: Name of childhood best friend. Hell, I don’t know! When during childhood? Matt? Cassie? Diana? Andrea? Heather? I pick the one I thought I was most likely to have picked and wonder why I picked that for a security question, because the answer is so ambiguous.
I got it wrong. I try again, but with a different childhood friend’s name. Wrong again.
I have the brilliant idea to create a new log-in. And I see the options for security questions.
Date of your parent’s anniversary? Doesn’t accept standard date format, so I know I’ll never remember what format I entered it.
Phone number of a relative? I can see the childhood friend question repeating itself. Which relative? Which relative do I even know their phone number? They’re all saved in my phone and the only time I’ve ever looked at the actual number was when I entered it into said phone. Which relative will I think in three months that I would have picked three months ago? It’s so recursive!
So that’s why I think I chose the childhood friend question.
While careening down the rabbit hole of self-psychologizing my childhood, family relationships, and what is an important memory for me now, in the past, and in the future in a task that was supposed to take 30 seconds, I smell burning.