My employer got bought (again) about a year ago, so we're being moved onto a new benefits setup as of January 1. This means new health insurance (with new prices, sigh...). We were told we'd get our ID cards in December. I have an appointment in early January that would be a pain to reschedule, so I've been watching for these.

Today I received physical mail, but instead of cards, it contained a piece of paper telling me my plan ID # and a URL where I can request cards or print my own.

They sent me paper to tell me how to request paper, instead of just sending the actual paper I needed.

After creating an account (another set of hoops, elided) I saved PDF copies, but I also asked for physical cards because paper probably won't stay in good shape in a wallet for a year. But this was unnecessarily complicated. I also hit a stupid limit: you can make one request per day, but both my medical and dental insurance are now with this carrier, that's two cards, and there was no way to request all cards. I requested the first, which was apparently successful, and when I requested the second I was told I couldn't.

The letter I got suggested I could use "digital cards", meaning download an image on my phone and skip the paper entirely, to "save space in my wallet" (not a concern, since I'm replacing this year's cards!). But my healthcare providers always want to hold the cards, sometimes keeping them for a while so they can do data entry at their convenience during my visit, and I'm not handing over my phone for that. My phone stays with me or, at worst, within my sight and otherwise locked. So paper it is.

I don't know if I'm abnormal or the insurance provider didn't think through their security model (maybe both). They sure didn't think through their model of what's convenient for users or lower-waste for the planet. By the time this is done they will, it appears, have sent me three separate pieces of physical mail.

People in the Reform movement have been talking a lot lately about inclusion, with a particular focus right now on disabilities. ( rant alert: lots of Kool Aid, not much common sense )

But every time something like the to'evah (abomination -- and yes, I understand the strength of that word) of this past Friday's service happens, a tiny little voice speaks up in the back of my mind saying "you know, this could be a lot easier on you...". It's frustrating. If it weren't for the excellent relationships I've formed in my congregation, including both of our rabbis, I sometimes wonder...

So, this Shabbat the Reform movement celebrated its sisterhood's 100th anniversary (movement-wide, not just us). Cool -- sisterhood has never, ever spoken to me (and in fact I believe its existence violates a core principle of Reform theology, but that's a different post), but I can understand the desire to celebrate that milestone and all their accomplishments, honor their leaders, and so on. The international president of the sisterhood umbrella organization happens to be a member of my congregation, so clearly we were going to do something. So Friday's service was led by sisterhood leaders from a siddur produced by a committee of that umbrella organization.

They wrote a "creative" service. Cue ominous music here.

So what we got was an evening service that ran almost two hours (!) and still managed to omit half the amidah and all the brachot around the sh'ma except one (there was a song for hashkiveinu). Also all of kabbalat shabbat except L'cha Dodi, but we never get a complete kabbalat shabbat unless I'm running it, so that's noteworthy in degree but not in type (we usually do more than this, though not all). Are they kidding me? Who thought this was ok? Rabbis and cantors on the committee, apparently, so part of me is glad I don't know their identities as my opinion of them has just gone way down. (My rabbi tried to salvage some of the omissions during the service; I don't know if he had had a chance to vet this service beforehand or if he had trusted his colleagues.)

What did they fill all that time with? Lots of poetry, lots of "women are great" readings, lots of sisterhood self-congratulations, half a dozen "how sisterhood changed my life" testimonials incorrectly labeled as a d'var torah in the program... all sorts of stuff that would be more appropriate at a celebratory dinner than at a Shabbat service. Shabbat, and God, got short shrift -- at a Shabbat service.

(There was also a short torah service (we do that on Friday nights about half the time), with group aliyot. The last one of the three was for anyone who belongs to sisterhood; I didn't go up because they said "belongs", not "pays dues to"; I've never felt I belonged but as a board member I'm required to be a member on paper.)

When I got there and saw the service booklet I considered turning around and leaving. In retrospect I should have, perhaps visibly. Instead I ignored their service at times and picked up our regular siddur instead so I could have a valid Shabbat service. (My rabbi noticed.) But after the mourner's kaddish I saw that there were still a couple more pages of readings and stuff, plus they were going to teach a new closing song, and at that point I just said dayeinu and left. Ugh.

If they had wanted to have a special additional service that would be one thing. But this displaced the regular community service. In that regard it was even worse than a typical Reform bar mitzvah, and I hadn't realized that was possible. It is possible to honor people while preserving community norms, but that isn't a strong-enough guiding principle in the Reform movement. I alternate between being sad and saying "how dare they?".

When I got home I set aside what I had been planning to talk about in Saturday morning's d'var torah (it was my turn) and mentally assembled something else instead. That'll be forthcoming, but in case you wonder when you see it, yes there's a connection.

The last time I did this (a couple years ago, I think), I went to the USPS web site, chose my stamps, and supplied a credit card and shipping address. It took about three minutes.

Last night I went through the following process:

1. I dug through product pages; the generic "forever" stamps that almost everybody wants are no longer the first thing you see.

2. I also wanted some pretty stamps for some invitations, so I browsed those. Clicking on the link for a specific product to get a closer look and then going back to the previous page reset the page values I had set (specifically: show all, instead of in batches of twelve). So after the first time I launched new tabs to view products.

3. Some of these invitations are going to Canada so I had to look up the postage rate. This involved approximately the following, all in form-like interfaces: choose type of package, choose shape of envelope (kind of a stumper; is my card a "letter" or a "square envelope"? no sizes were given), choose weight, and finally get a price. I'd been hoping for a simple rate table or at least for the most-common question ("how much to send a letter?") to be answered up front.

4. Now that I had everything in my shopping cart I thought I was within a minute or so of being done. That "crash-tinkle" sound you heard was my hopes being shattered. My options at this point were to log in or create an account.

5. I tried the username and password that I would have used had I created an account last time and got told "no such user". (Bruce Schneier is cringing, I'm sure, but at least they saved me the trouble of trying different passwords.) There is still no option to just pay already. Ok, I'll create an account. (By the way, Firefox offered to remember that password I typed. This will be relevant later.)

6. The password-entry form includes an assessment of the strength of my password. Nice. It thus came as a total surprise to me that my strong password was also not a valid password. They said special characters were fine, but I guess they didn't mean all of them. I simplified to a less-strong password.

7. The personal-information page requires a phone number. I typed it with hyphens and it accepted that. It thus came as a surprise to me when, on a later page, I couldn't put spaces in my credit-card number. In neither case was there any direction about formatting.

8. I had failed to notice that giving my credit card a "nickname" (what? I'm only giving you one!) was a required step. Clearing all form fields and telling me to try again was unnecessarily rude.

9. I finally had an account and now had to log in. I wondered whether my shopping cart would still be intact after all this, but it was. Yay. 20+ minutes after I'd started, I was finally able to submit my order.

10. After signing out, I decided to sign back in and let Firefox remember some data this time, since I'd had to violate my password patterns and might not remember. The login dialogue wasn't the form that I'd previously encountered but, rather, some pop-up (Flash?) thing that was very sensitive (had to try a few times to get it). Firefox couldn't detect this as a login dialogue. So I guess when I come back in a couple years I'll be finding out what the "forgot password" link does. This won't be helped by the fact that I had to provide answers to security questions including the word "favorite". Pfft.

I liked it better when the minimalist approach worked. Yeah, sure, now they'll remember my address and credit-card number, but it takes me 30 seconds to type those and anyway the credit-card info will probably be stale by the next time I need stamps. I'd have to make an awful lot of transactions before last night's time sink would pay for itself.

Followup June 15: This is how they shipped my stamps to me. Those pieces of cardboard are pretty thick. I think they could have done better.

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A third decision was unambiguously (IMO) bad: they made it opt-out instead of opt-in. I am having trouble thinking of a single case where it would be a good idea to automatically, and without notification, make changes to existing accounts. [Edit: I meant good for the customer, and not counting things like "hey, we gave you more disk space". I mean new behaviors.] Auto-on for new accounts is quite defensible (with documentation); changing the behavior of accounts that people set up on the basis of a different implicit contract, no. Especially if you haven't previously sent out an update to your privacy policy.

There's one more problem with Buzz: opt-out doesn't really work. If you do the obvious thing and click on the "turn Buzz off" link, all that does is remove a shortcut. Your connections are still there. That's just bad engineering.

Google says they have heard the feedback and will fix things in a few days. And, while I can't verify this without a second account, some people believe that deleting your profile keeps Buzz at bay. [Edit: confirmed with the help of another gmail user, thanks.]

Buzz could, potentially, be a useful tool, though it remains to be seen whether the world really needed yet another attempt at a social-networking site. But their roll-out of it has left a bad taste in my mouth, so I'm likely to wait a while, until I hear positive reviews from people whose opinions I value, before I touch it. And I'll have to be certain that they aren't publishing information that (otherwise) exists only in my mailbox. Linking to my public Picasa album is fine; it's public (same as the vast majority of this journal). Telling the world who I correspond with and how often, however, is not.