We were pretty late in filling out our 2010 taxes, because the student loan people couldn’t get us the information that we needed. But we are supposed to be getting a refund in the ballpark of $12,500 dollars. I’m beginning to wonder if that money isn’t fictitious. When I filled it out, I requested Direct Deposit. Apparently, if you’re post-deadline, they can’t do that. So I sent it in by mail. A month or so later, we got a letter saying that they couldn’t do direct deposit and that they would be sending it to us by mail. Contact them if it hasn’t arrived in 3-4 weeks. 5-6 weeks later, and it still hasn’t arrived. So I call the IRS. They tell me that they’ve sent it before they even sent the letter saying that they were going to send it. So now I have to fill out a form to inquire where the check is. They will then investigate and get back to me. That’s going to be another 6-8 weeks. The only problem is that I didn’t write down the information on which day they sent the check, which the form needs. So now I am going to have to call the IRS again.

I’ve also been having to make calls to various banks, cancelling the credit/debit cards on my lost wallet and requesting replacements. Three cheers for Discover, who had a new one out to me in two days. By two days, I thought they meant three. I thought that if I called on Sunday, they’d mail it out on Monday and it would arrive on Wednesday. It arrived early Tuesday. The Bank of the Northern Hemisphere was less responsive, giving me what I had expected from everybody: either five to seven (for debit) or five to 10 days (for credit). The cards are coming from Lakota, which is in our mailing unit, so I’m hoping it’ll be close to the former. This is important because I will be heading to Vegas on Wednesday and it would be helpful to have more plastic rather than less (though never again will I have all my plastic in a single wallet. Back to Discover, the only annoying thing about that process was that, when it came to activating my card, they made me talk to a live person who had a script about asking me what I loved about my Discover Card. I truthfully answered: “You got me a new card in two days.”

The last round of phone involved medical bills. Evidently, our insurance company carries nothing when it comes to pregnancy. I’ve never seen so many “Insurance payments: $0” in my life. In the first case, they simply didn’t have our insurance information. So I played phone tag for four days while we tried to get that situated. After looking at all of the other bills, I am expecting that insurance won’t pay for anything anyway. There are arguments against insurance covering pregnancy, though it brings up one of my constant irritations with our health care system, which is that you never know if something will be paid for until after you do it.