"Raising Hell with Bejeweled 2 at the Collections Office" by Troy H. Cheek on Dec 22, 2008
The title this week actually refers to three different things, but I'll bet I can tie them all together by the end of the story.
Christmas came a little bit early for me. I picked up Overlord Raising Hell as an early Christmas present to myself.
Raising Hell is the not-sequel to Overlord. It's a stand-alone expansion pack, which is an oxymoron if ever I heard one. It's a game which adds to the content of the original game, however you don't need the original game to play. As I understand it, you get expansions like this when the company has a contract to put out a sequel but no contract for a sequel. (Star Trek: Star Fleet Command: Volume II: Empires at War: Stand Alone Expansion Pack Orion Pirates, I'm looking at you.) By marketing it as an expansion pack, it's considered part of the original game. By making it stand alone, your audience is not limited to people who own (or have even heard of) the original game. If Overlord was a movie, Raising Hell would be the Director's Cut Special Edition DVD of said movie.
Raising Hell continues the original story, which is basically of a fallen hero raised from the dead to become the next evil Overlord. You're the hero. You can choose to play the game as if you were a straight hero, using evil only to defeat other evil, and eventually create a paradise. Where's the fun in that? It's much more fun to go full evil and corrupt the entire land. I've beat the original game several times, once as "good" and the other times with varying degrees of "ax-weilding maniac."
The expansion adds about a half dozen new missions. They vary from painfully obvious to impossible. Oh, they're not impossible to complete. The puzzles are just so arbitrary that I'm not sure how I was supposed to ever figure out how to solve them without resorting to the occasional web search. I've yet to start a totally new game from the beginning, as the expansion detected my old saved games and allowed me to start with all my enhanced weapons and armor and minions. I took what I assume is the easy road. I finished the expansion in a couple of days. I plan to start over from scratch to see if the expansion plays any differently that way. If not, I'd pretty much have to say that this expansion pack is a bust. On the other hand, it did get me playing again.
At the same time, I also picked up another game. Bejeweled 2 is a puzzle game where you swap jewels in a grid to create groups which then explode, allowing more jewels to fall down into those spots. I assume it is the sequel to a similarly named original. It's got a nice, slow, strategy game. This is great for the older gamers in the house. It's also got a timed version which turns into a clickfest pretty quickly. I prefer the timed version for two reasons.
No, I'm not kidding. I stopped playing the strategy version about the third time I'd planned out some brilliant combination for the next three or four moves, made move number one, was mousing over to the next move, only to be told there were no more moves. Seriously, I could see multiple moves on the board, make the first, be on my way to make the second, only to have the game announce that there were no more moves. Of course, it clears the board as soon as it says that, so you don't have anything you can show as proof.
I also like the background music. I've been known to start up the game, pause, and let the music play while I go about my business elsewhere.
Which leads me to the final piece of the trifecta. Earlier this year, I had to go see an eye doctor for some tests. See Eye Can't Stand It and The Eyes Have It for details. What I didn't detail at the time was that I was concerned about my medical insurance covering these tests. My insurance is provided through the hospital where I work, so most of the care is provided by professionals and businesses which are somehow related to the hospital. The eye doctor was related to another hospital, so I had my doubts that said eye doctor had a contract with my hospital to provide services.
When my regular doctor set up the appointment on my behalf, I called his staff to make sure the eye doctor was covered by my insurance. "Are you sure this new doctor is covered by my insurance?" I asked.
"Of course, Mister Creek," came the answer. "We called your insurance company and got their help picking out a specialist."
I called the insurance company and asked if the new doctor was covered. "Are you sure this new doctor is covered by my particular plan?" I asked.
"Of course, Mister Smeef," came the answer. "I have double-checked that we have a contract with this doctor."
Before I had my first appointment with the eye doctor, I asked if they took my insurance. "Are you sure you accept this particular insurance plan?" I asked.
"Of course, Mister Smith," came the answer. "We accept that insurance. We have many patients with your exact medical insurance plan already."
A month or two later, I got my first bill from the eye doctor. After I managed to squeeze my eyeballs back into my head, I convinced myself not to worry. I knew from experience that often the first bill was based on an estimate of what the insurance plan will pay, so I usually didn't pay my part until I see an explanation of benefits from the insurance company. Unfortunately, the explanation of benefits agreed with the bill.
I quick call to my insurance company assured me that this was not a problem with coverage. The eye doctor was covered. I just hadn't hit my deductible yet, so I was getting charged for the full amount of the bill. Fine. I paid.
Several months later, after another visit, I got another eye-popping bill. I called the insurance company again. This time, I was told that my eye doctor was not fully covered by my insurance plan, and that if this was a problem, I should have checked the coverage before I sought the treatment. Besides the fact that I never sought any treatment in the first place (I simply took advantage of testing I was told was necessary and fully covered), I checked with three different people at three different companies before my first appointment. However, the nice man allowed that he did have record of my calls asking about coverage and agreed to pass my problem up to his supervisor, possibly kicking it over to Quality Assurance or Performance Management or whatever department fixed problems caused by people giving customers the wrong information. He said he was writing it up as an appeal of denial of coverage and that I would get a call when a decision was made. I called the eye doctor and explained all this. They agreed that it would be perfectly acceptable to hold off on paying the bill for a short while so this could be straightened out.
A month and a half later, I got a call from a very rude young lady representing a collections agency. According to her, the eye doctor had turned my account over to them. Furthermore, she claimed that I owed about twice the amount that the bills they'd been sending me said I did. I explained that I was waiting on news of an appeal from my insurance company and that the doctor's staff was aware of this. She then got even ruder and wanted to know my insurance company name because, according to her, since her company was now in charge of the account, any future insurance payments would go to her. I told her to never contact me again about the debt and hung up.
I then called the insurance company. The relatively nicer lady was able to determine that there'd never been an appeal filed. She did have record that I'd called, but it was documented that my question about coverage had been answered. Her records were conspiciously absent of any calls made prior to my first visit to the eye doctor or just after I'd received the first bill. The nice man who was going to take care of my problem had apparently taken care of it by making all my supporting evidence go away. The nicer lady was also able to tell me why my bill had doubled on its way to the collection agency: the eye doctor was also charging me for a followup appointment for which I had yet to receive an actual bill.
I then called the eye doctor's office. The slightly nicer lady said that she was in charge of billing and wasn't aware until I asked that my account had been turned over to collections. She was also surprised to hear that collections was trying to collect for the followup since she wasn't aware that it had been billed to me yet. Ultimately, however, since the debt was in the hands of collections, she couldn't do anything by give me the address of the collections agency if I wanted to make a payment.
As I was about to hang up, she cheerfully added "And remember, Mister Brown, you have another appointment in February!"
"Like Hell I do!" I cheerfully told her before slamming down the phone.
When I got home later that day, I checked my mail. In the mail, I found a letter from the collection agency. Said letter actually did a pretty good job explaining the origin of the debt and how it had come into their possession. In fact, had I received the letter before any of the above phone conversations, I probably would have just written a check and been done with it. As it was, I cussed and muttered and lost sleep for three days.
The thing which ties this item with the last? While speaking to the slightly nicer lady at the eye doctor's office, I kept hearing something in the background. Long after I hung up, I realized what it was.
It was the background music from Bejeweled 2.
