Please Don't Make Me Talk To You

"A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation." ~ Bertrand Russell

Part of my job here is to manage workers' comp insurance issues. When someone gets hurt, I make sure the claim gets filed with our insurance company and track their progress if their injury is such that they miss work or are reduced to light duty. I also have to call the boys (and they are always boys) periodically just to let them know we're all thinking of them. Our insurance people tell us that calling the injured ones motivates them to get back to work because they think that means we actually care whether they get better. This is my least favorite part of the job.

In fact, I don't really care how they're doing. I just want them to get well and get their accident-prone asses back at work. Every day they miss work just adds to the cost of premiums next year. Workers' comp can kill a small company. Don't get me wrong. When people get injured at work, the company should ensure that the bills get paid. If they need to be at home recuperating, the company should make sure that's financially feasible for them. I just don't wish to talk with them once every couple of weeks.

Some folks are suspiciously accident-prone. We had this one guy who worked for us five different times over the course of several years. He would work a week or two and get hurt. I mean badly hurt. Hurt as in taking the next six weeks off. I finally told the owner of the company that he needed to keep his personnel folks from hiring him again. The guy's name was Wally. He's a Viet Nam vet who writes poetry and will tell you all about it, whether or not you wish to know. We were all relieved to see Wally go because it meant we could go to the company Christmas party without fear of getting stuck in a corner somewhere for a couple of hours, listening to Wally recite extremely bad poetry. Frankly, I expected some reward money from my co-workers for alleviating that anxiety.

We had another guy several years ago whose hobby was bull riding. Seriously. I live in Texas, where people do these kinds of things, but I will never understand what makes someone get up on top of a bull who is royally pissed off...other than just a serious streak of self-destructiveness. Anyway, this guy shows up at the doctor with a work-related shoulder injury. No one saw him get hurt and he came by the office the next day on his motorcycle. We had no way of knowing for sure that it wasn't some bull's fault (since said alleged impairment occurred first thing Monday morning), but we were all pretty sure that riding a motorcycle should be too painful for that type of shoulder injury. So we set up the Jose Ramirez (names changed to protect the idiotic) Memorial Film School. Every day he was unable to work, he was required to show up at the office, sit downstairs watching safety films by himself and writing synopses of them. This went on for about 30 days. He never got hurt again. I digress.


We have an office in another city in Texas and one in Virginia. They are responsible for their own injury claims, which only makes sense because it would add a lot of extra time to the claims process if they all had to come through me. Plus, I'd be calling even more assholes, trying to convince them that even though I've never met them, I'm just broken up about their injuries. Virginia has very different reporting requirements and coordinating everything to meet those requirements would require Herculean effort.

Suddenly the office manager in Virginia has taken to sending me copies of the workers' comp reports. They've been filing these reports for the past decade by themselvers and I never hear anything about them unless someone has a question about legal issues. Just opening the envelope and seeing the reports irritates me. I suppose I could call her and ask why I'm suddenly so completely in the loop, but then I'd have to talk to her. I dislike talking to her at least as much as the injured workers. It's nothing about her specifically, it's just that I'm most contented when I'm not interacting with people. (By the way, I referred to myself recently as "anti-social" when, in fact, I should have said "asocial." Thanks to my therapist for that clarification.)

I don't really have a point here, other than the fact that I got one of those reports today and starting yapping in my head about it. I just thought I'd include you in the yap. I feel better already.