Going Viral

By now you know why I am out in the mangroves of an evening. I've had some bad days at work,  too much stress for all of us and I breathe a sigh of relief when Rusty and I decamp here a few minutes from home and a million miles from the world that makes less and less sense to me.

I wear a mask again. My wife so far cannot be vaccinated owing to the medicines she takes and my colleagues who argue vehemently that Covid is a hoax are so obtuse as to not noticed the death this year of  County Commissioner Craig Cates' wife and daughter who himself suffered agonies with the virus and barely survived. 

Out here in the wilderness I have no need of a mask, or to to explain myself, or to have a conversation with anyone other than Rusty. I don't even have to ask myself how we have managed to lose control of our lives once again.

At work we are sending more ambulances to people with Covid, the other shift told me last week they had six in one day which is a huge number for Key West. The newspaper the last time I looked said seven people were in the hospital for Covid but I try to avoid the numbers as they unsettle me. 

And all of it preventable. I used to think the Internet would bring knowledge in an easily accessible form such that rumor mongering would be abolished. I guess I was wrong there. Rumors are everywhere and getting worse. 

And so we wear masks, again. Its weird because I have had a World Health organization vaccination card since I was 19 and first rode my motorcycle in Africa. I've been vaccinated against polio, mumps, yellow fever, and I can't think what else, small pox comes to mind, and here I am. Sometimes I think that when a program is successful we end up undermining it because we can't remember how awful was the situation that prompted the remedy.

Plagues were common even in the 19th century. People died in waves in Florida thanks to Yellow Fever; in the Middle Ages bubonic plague slaughtered hundreds of thousands. In Western Canada while the Civil War was raging in the US, small pox was wiping out Indians across Western Canada as they had no immunity to the disease. Nowadays we take good health for granted, and a long life is a birth right. Yet we cannot recall that vaccinations made it so. 

I hear people call for the end of Social Security, the old age pension instituted to counter the appalling hardship of the elderly in the Great Depression. Indeed President Roosevelt designed the system the way it si so the only way to wreck it would be to deprive one generation of donors from receiving their just share. So far it has survived but we are told all the time it isn't viable. A fearful population is more easily manipulated and poverty creates deep seated fear. Therefore it's best to destroy  the system that helps keep poverty at bay. 

All the ferment and misdirected rage feels like a national mood that will need a confrontation to be cleared, similar to the street battles and lack of communication of the anger and mistrust of the late 60s and the Vietnam War Era. I feel lucky to have lived the bulk of my life in peaceful times, to be coming to the end of my life with social security to boost my city retirement, and to have been vaccinated easily and early against the disease. 

I wish more of the people around me felt lucky to live in a  country with all these amenities and good fortune. I am also watching the Taliban take back Afghanistan city by city in an uncomfortable replay of the fall of South Vietnam and wonder how it must feel to know what's coming and the inevitability of the advance of a dark age of repression closing over your country.

I try to banish these thoughts with my dog and my camera and my mangroves but Florida's refusal to step up to protect the weak, like my wife, is pushing me to seriously consider early retirement and an early exile from the state. 

We've been lucky so far with my wife's last year of school taking place from home with distance teaching. Last year the police department embraced distancing and masks but this year virus fatigue is everywhere and I understand it too because I'm sick of this unnecessary caution in a country brimming with vaccine doses ready to give away.

I wonder how Fantasy Fest will contribute to the spread of Covid not simply in Key West  but with tens of thousands of unmasked people determined to put the plague behind them. The entire police department will be downtown keeping order. I shudder to think.

And then, as we fail to eradicate the virus I wonder what the next variant will bring. Unlike humans I'm told viruses don't give up and keep replicating and mutating until they get their way. We may be dealing with this for a while.

Meanwhile I look around and enjoy the minimalist mangrove views, the silence and the sound of my dog sniffing. Keep hoping for the best.

Gables

I took myself off on a lunch break with no real idea where i was going or what I was going to do; I simply wanted to be outdoors for half an hour.

My favorite part of town is the area around Fleming and Southard Streets filled with trees, attractive homes, shadows and light. However I had no idea what I was going to photograph. I looked up and saw a window framed by some trees, then I saw this:

The church on William Street is always worth a look, looking up:

I was interested in the wooden shutter over the gabled window in this elderly Dade Pine home and a plane flew overhead:

I started to get into the spirit of the gables all along William Street:

And then this heavily shuttered and shaded one:

This is another eyebrow house with the roof overhanging the top floor.  It was a design to allow air flow erven in the rain but all it ends u doing, reportedly, is trapping hot air inside the house. Nowadays eyebrow houses are decorative survivors and not practical tropical designs.

Below the example is of a Bahama shutter that leans out:

This white one below is an old Florida design, shutter and hurricane protection in one metal design:

The classic over the top roofline can also be seen along Duval Street if you remember to look up:

Proper hurricane shutters bolted in place denoting winter residents only in this place:

Similarly with solid wooden shutters:

And then back to work I went after surprising myself with an unexpected yet rewarding interest in small top floor windows. Key west takes time to reveal itself.

Southernmost Southernmost

The fence behind the buoy marks the end of civilian Key West and the Navy base is off limits to most people which is why the real southernmost point which is on the base is replaced by this cement structure:

Nevertheless the tourists flock to the site of the purported southernmost point in the continental United States to take their photos. 

This is during tourist low season, in summer:

Look at them all milling around patiently in the sun which for them must be quite torrid and humidity-laced.  You can come by at four in the morning and be quite alone because they don't pack the monument up overnight and put it away. 

And then if you walk up South Street to get back to your toasty car you may find yourself passing the southernmost this and that.

With a  convenient replica of the original and here, with some judicious editing you could pose here in the shade in front of the most desirable point.

Or stop here half a block from the great point and have some refreshment as close to Cuba, the forbidden isle, as you can get. Finding oneself this close to Cuba is a great draw in some people's minds.

More southernmost stuff as you get close to Duval Street. I've been to El Paso and never noticed a business claiming to be the "closest whatever" to Mexico. But here, as remote and untouchable as Cuba is in reality, the draw of the pretend relationship is ever present.

Banana leaves umbrellas and palms decorate the suitably southernmost guest house.

And this magnificent wedding cake is the Southernmost House, 1400 Duval Street.  You can pay to sleep and eat here if you like. However this too is not without controversy because the last house on the street, the one right next to the famous point has a sign on the entrance gate.

And here it is, the other southernmost house. The southernmost southernmost house. If you didn't believe me before perhaps you do now. Being the southernmost is very important to some people.

There is also a southernmost beach resort. This one is on the other side of Duval Street, not far from the southernmost ice cream store and surf shop as I recall.

I am quite fond of Hawaii's southernmost point which you can like me, view on Google maps. It's a wooden sign in a muddy open space overlooking the water. But that fails to have as much appeal as the big red marker. My friends come for their pictures, including Bill who rode his scooter from Jacksonville:

I stopped by on my first visit to Key West in 1981 on my then very modern Vespa P200 which then took me to Mexico and California:

And as I was uncertain of the outcome of the impending Category Five hurricane I stopped by before Hurricane Irma in 2017. My Vespa S150 and I both survived in the police station during that Category Four catastrophe.

No one is immune to the draw of the mighty Southernmost Point!

Accidental Zen Master

Friday I worked overtime and after work I took Rusty to Blimp Road where it was too hot and he cut the walk short and sat by the car in it's shade.

Three storm formations are building the Eastern Atlantic, none of them are rated as likely to build into anything more than rainy tropical rainy waves. When one of them does, there will be much worry about the safety of stuff in peoples' lives.

Hurricane season starts June 1st so the unwary and inexperienced need to be reminded that peak hurricane season is shared by September and October when the ocean waters have been nicely warmed by longer summer daylight hours. Recently the National Hurricane Center in Miami advised the hurricane season will produce some doozies in their estimation: NOAA August 4th.

A lunch break Friday saw me converting our piggybank into a $36  deposit at the machine that sorts coins at First State Bank. The piggybank itself will soon go on Facebook by my indefatigable wife who is selling anything we don't want to store or carry in the van, which amounts to a lot of surplus stuff.

As she is already retired she is in charge of packing, so I have to nail down anything I want to keep, not much, as every day the house attains that state of Zen emptiness that I secretly happen to prefer.

My father threw out my childhood belongings the day after he sent me to Italy to sort out my mother's inheritance which she left to us youngsters and superstitiously refused to write a will. By the time my sisters had finished fighting over the inheritance, a spectacle that revolted me and turned me off to money for the rest of my life, my childhood was gone into the dumpster and was too late to retrieve from my childhood home in England.

That set the pattern for my life, a collection of progressively fewer and fewer things: when I emigrated to the US, when I moved onto a  boat, and so forth with each of many changes I shed more vestiges of my history in each move. The result is I have hardly anything to my name, a few books and with the blessings of digital recordings I have an iCloud of photographs. It's easy then to move into the van for me.

And as I came into the world so shall I leave it one day, with no regrets for the things I have scattered along the way and discarded as I went. There is much to see and the weight of stuff slows you down.

 

Taking Phone Calls

 

In a year and a half I will be on Medicare and the Guardian recently reported an issue that makes me glad not to be contributing to this mess reported below. The City of key West uses Cigna and they did fine by me while I was in the hospital. Answering 911 calls is supposed to be the acme of stress but working in a call center as described below would be impossible for me. 

Employees started a petition demanding improvements, including lifting a pay raise freeze and removing pressure to meet metrics

Cigna, one of the largest health insurance corporations in the US, reported an increase in profits from $5.1bn in 2019 to $8.5bn in 2020. Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP

Michael Sainato

Tue 3 Aug 2021 05.00 EDT

Call center workers at Cigna, one of the largest health insurance corporations in the US, are reporting poor working conditions driven by high production demands, fear of being fired, lack of training, and long processing times for customers to receive reimbursement for Covid-19 testing costs.

The unrest comes as Cigna’s profits in 2020 increased to $8.5bn from $5.1bn in 2019. David Cordani, the CEO of Cigna, received nearly $79m in compensation in 2020, a raise of $13.4m from the previous year. In March 2021, Cigna announced plans to increase expenditures on stock buybacks to $8bn over the next four years.

Cigna is closing offices around the US, switching several positions and departments to remote work permanently.

Up to 43m Americans could lose health insurance amid pandemic, report says

Read more

Several months ago, workers started an online petition demanding Cigna improve working conditions, including lifting a pay raise freeze, stopping constant harassment of workers to meet production metrics and providing a way for workers to report abusive callers.

“Customer management requires us to handle phone calls within a specific amount of time,” said a call representative at Cigna in the midwest who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “The numbers are hardcore. They’re constantly on you about them and to me, that doesn’t really meet the customers’ needs. The phone call metrics could go down if customer service advocates were trained better and we had better resources.”

The worker explained they often receive phone calls from customers who have called repeatedly without any resolution to their problem, and that they are constantly being monitored by apps and prompted to move on to the next call.

“I always get pressured on every end. There were days that I would almost be in tears before I would even log in for work, I just mentally, emotionally and physically cannot handle that anymore,” the representative added. “There were times when I was the sixth customer service advocate that they’ve talked to in the last couple of weeks, and nothing is getting resolved. Nothing. This is a customer who has called multiple times and they’re upset. This is their health insurance. This is something that’s important. And when you can’t resolve it for either lack of training or lack of time because you’re having to meet metrics, that gets old.”

A second customer service advocate in the midwest explained a whole new set of issues arose once the Covid-19 pandemic hit and workers were allowed to work from home. Paid time off was taken from workers for any technical issues they experienced while working remotely, and staff handled a huge volume of calls from customers irritated about the delays in processing Covid-19 testing reimbursement claims.

A customer service advocate at Cigna said a new set of issues arose once the Covid-19 pandemic hit and workers were allowed to work from home. Photograph: Bryan Woolston/AP

“The process was unbelievable. It could have been six months before reimbursement and it was going to be in a multitude of checks. We’re given 15 minutes to make outbound phone calls to doctor offices, provider offices, and they get taken away because of the call volume metrics,” the worker said. “The numbers are constantly driven down your throat. Email, after email, after email – check your numbers, make sure you hit your numbers and everything. Our manager would post our numbers daily so everybody on your team knows whether or not you’re meeting your metrics.”

In addition to the increased workloads and frustrating processes, the worker explained that customer service advocates did not receive a raise this year.

“After a year of Covid, and all of us making adjustments for Covid and everything. They were like, ‘Well, sorry, you’re not getting a raise, you know, you’re just out of luck this year,’” one worker said.

Workers said human resources held focus groups in response to the online petition, but that nothing has changed. Several workers have quit.

“Burnout is very high and these jobs, the metrics they have to meet in many cases are impossible to meet, particularly if they’re talking to a health plan enrollee who has a complicated case. But they’re on the clock and there’s an expectation they will handle a certain number of calls in a day,” said Wendell Potter, who worked at Cigna from 1993 until he retired in 2008 as vice president of corporate communications and became a whistleblower on the industry.

Potter added: “You have to deal with people who are in a difficult spot and in many cases angry, trying to figure out their health plan, benefits and why something was denied or why they had to get prior authorization for something. In my view, it’s one of the most stressful jobs in a health insurance company.”

Jordyn Emeree, who worked as a call representative at Cigna in Illinois for two years, quit last month over the stressful working conditions and because she says a manager discriminated against her for being a transgender woman, telling her that she shouldn’t expect everyone at work to accept her transition.

“In the two years being with Cigna I never got a bonus as we’re supposed to get one every quarter. I had to fight for my yearly raise last year as it was not given to me,” said Emeree. “They let the members emotionally abuse us and we can’t do anything about it besides wait for a supervisor to become available to take the call.”

A Cigna spokesperson declined to comment on any individual complaint, but said in an email, “Cigna takes all feedback seriously, including external petitions such as this one. We have a wide range of tools to ensure our employees’ voices are heard. We regularly survey all employees covering topics like workload, conditions, and stress, host town halls, conduct focus groups, and actively encourage our managers to have open and honest discussions with their teams about how we can better support our colleagues. We’re proud of the culture we’ve created, but know there’s always room to improve, so appreciate all feedback we receive.”