Monday, June 29, 2009
Survey says: It's got me beat
Ben Beagle
The aging, semi-hysterical retired reporter rides shotgun with the greatest station wagon driver of them all down the rocky road of life. Mondays and Wednesdays, steady as she goes.
Recent columns
Here is the aged, semihysterical reporter who has been unfortunate enough to have received from our health insurance company a mailing called Medicare Coordination of Benefits and Status Survey.
Before you get one of these, go hide in the bar of the Bide-A-Wee Motel or join the Army again.
Or go nuts. It's up to you.
This thing asks if you are retired and for the date of your retirement. And then it asks if you have health insurance through your current job.
Anyway, if you're like Old No. 36 here, you're beginning to sweat a whole lot.
And then we go into Section B, where I am asked if I plan to retire within the next year.
Are you people getting this? I've been retired since 1992, and I wish that maybe I didn't have health insurance if I had to answer this kind of screwed up survey.
Listen. I've had enough.
I'll take Ripa over Palin
Every time I look around there's Sarah Palin, and I get suspicious spasms in my forearms.
She is just so charming that she might replace Kelly Ripa on that morning show with old Regis.
That probably pays more than the governor of Alaska, and it gives added opportunities to run one's mouth for no good reason.
And it would reduce the horror of having a ding-dong like Sarah in the White House.
If worse ever comes to worse, I'd rather have Kelly in the Oval Office as the skinniest person ever to pick up the red phone.
The Greatest Station Wagon Driver of Them All thinks that people who make up these surveys should be drawn and quartered, and I filled out hers and wondered why I had to put down her retirement date. And I cram both surveys into the return envelope, which has no return postage.
And I think of the president with his smoking problems.
About that smoking issue
Listen, Mr. President, I quit after chewing about 400 tons of Nicorette, when it was a prescription drug and had the capacity to pull out every filling in your head.
One day I quit for 45 minutes and drove to the convenience store and bought a pack of Winston Light 100s, lit up and got so drunk I couldn't drive home.
And that was before I had to punch out a six-letter name on my telephone in order to speak to the person with a six-letter name.
To be frank here, Mr. President, if I had been trying to punch in somebody named Ivanavlich Nortorsavitch, I might have started smoking again.
Not that I have anything against anybody with a name like that.
I just hope I never have to punch him up someday.
Ben Beagle's column runs in Monday's Extra.
