2020 and a New Decade (or not)

I was watching one of the news programs this morning, and as you probably know, the 'hardest' news is first thing, and as the program continues -- especially if it has multiple hours -- each segment becomes 'softer' than the one before.  A soft segment caught my attention, as the anchors first debated how we're going to pronounce 2020, and then moved on to the question of whether it was a new decade or not.

You might be looking at 2020, and trying to figure out what the dispute was.  I suspect most of you saw those four digits and thought of them as "twenty-twenty".  After all, aren't we nearing the end of twenty-nineteen?  Didn't the roaring twenties take place in nineteen-twenty?  And that is certainly the camp that I would fall into. But it turns out there are some who are calling next year "two thousand twenty".

My first thought was "Really?"  My next thought was "Hmmm".  On the one hand, I would never say One Thousand Nine Hundred Fifty-Seven. The year would be half over before I finished.  But that's not a problem with, say,  2019, or 2020, or 2021. Sure, the 'long' way has one extra word, but it somehow sounds more formal, more scientific.  And when I give someone my office phone number, I finish with "five-six-zero-six", rather than "five-six-oh-six"...  even though zero is a longer word than oh.  Of course, I don't say "five thousand six hundred six", but that's different.

So I think I'll have to say the jury is still out on how to pronounce 2020.  I've been saying twenty-nineteen for the past year, but I might try the 'long' way of saying 2020 for a month or so, and see what I think.

But then the next question was 'Does the next decade begin at the beginning of 2021, or the end of 2020'.  And surprisingly, the answer is No. The next decade begins January 1, 2021. While I was ready to argue with this answer, the explanation has me stepping back for a moment.  

While I'm still somewhat suspicious about how experts determined these things **,  it's been pointed out that the people living at that time, would not have called a year "0", as that idea would have been regarded as nonsense. And I can understand that. Which means that the first year AD was called 1 AD, and the year before that was called 1 BC. Yes, I know, that raises all sorts of questions, and you're not going to find those answers here, but you WILL find an explanation about the new decade.

So.. if the first year was year 1 (rather than year 0), that means that the first decade ran from January 1, 0001, through December 31, 0010.  And that makes sense to me.  Which means that the most recent decade began January 1, 2011, and will end on December 31, 2020.

Unless....  you're looking at Julian calendars, Jewish calendars, Chinese calendars, or some other calendar... in which case I have no idea what to tell you.  Except that if someone invites you to a party to celebrate the new decade... whether the party is the end of 2019, the beginning of 2020, or the beginning of 2021, you should say yes!

And of course if someone offers you a good cup of tea (which for me, is typhoo tea), you should always say yes, no matter what the date is!

 **People living in the years BC certainly didn't call those years BC.  And people living at the time that we changed from BC to AD didn't know they should suddenly start counting the years over again.  And of course how did they know when to start, so that the BC years ended and the AD years began? So when did someone draw the artificial line between BC and AD?  Because it certainly wasn't the people who were living in both years.  But that's a topic for another Teapot Musing.. or perhaps not!

What's in a Name?

According to William Shakespeare  "That which we call a rose. 
By any other name would smell as sweet".  (Said by Romeo, to Juliet)  

In other words, the specific name doesn't matter.


But I think perhaps Will missed the boat on this one.  (Before you start lambasting me in the comments, I realize that Shakespeare was just trying to make a point.... and now, so am I!)  

At first blush, it feels like most people don't have a choice in their name.  Parents choose a name when a child is born, it goes on the birth certificate, and there you go. 

But that's not really quite accurate.

I know someone who, as a child, decided she didn't like her first name (which was a perfectly fine name), and insisted that everyone call her by her middle name.  And she was amazingly adept at refusing to respond - or even react - if someone called her by her first name.  At some point, she reverted back to her first name.  I'm not sure about the reasoning behind her initial decision to change, or the decision to change back.  But the point is, she changed her name.

Beyond that, most of us are able to choose whether to use our formal name, or a shortened/modified nickname.  When we introduce ourselves to someone, we're choosing which name we want them to use. When I meet somebody who tells me their name is John, or Johnny, or Jack, I make some immediate assumptions about what sort of person they are.  Those assumptions might be wrong, they might be right... but I make those assumptions nonetheless, based on the name they give me.

Yet all of these are examples of first names.  What about last names?

Here's where I think it's interesting how people react.  For centuries, when a couple married, the woman 'lost' her last name and took on her new husband's last name.  Back in the 1970's and '80's, there was something of a trend was for the woman to put a hyphen after her last name, and add her husband's name.  A nice compromise, you might think, particularly where some husbands would change their last name to the new hybrid version. But it still meant that the woman (and man, if he joined in) 'lost' her last name.  

And then there were the variations of shifting your last name to your middle name, and taking on your husband's last name.  Or even just adding on the husband's last name so that now the woman had 4 names.  Except that the actual last name... was still her husband's last name.

And these variations were far from the norm.  In a 2009 study of government data, only 6% of women who married did something "unconventional", which included keeping their own name, hyphenating, and tacking on his last name at the end.  94% of women who married got rid of their own last name, and took their husband's last name.

Big deal, you say.  She still has her first name.  

And that's precisely what a friend told me the other day.  A male friend.  A male friend who married, and kept his own last name.

And that's when I realized that Shakespeare's Romeo didn't get it, and generally speaking, many men don't get it.  

Your name is your identity.  Men might mentally divide their lives into 'before I got married' and 'after I got married'.  And of course women make this same division.  But for women - or at least women who change their names...  they also think of themselves as "when I was {maiden name}", and "when I was {married name}".   When we meet someone we knew long ago, we don't say "oh, you knew me when I was known as {maiden name}"... rather, we say "oh, you knew me when I was {maiden name}."

Your name isn't just what others call you, your name is your identity. Not your first name, but your entire name.  Change that name, and you change your identity.

Romeo was right that a rose would smell as sweet if we called it something different.  But my name - my full name - is who I am.  And of course I'd be drinking typhoo tea, no matter what they called it.

Why I hate insurance companies

Be forewarned:  This is not a typical Teapot Musing.  This is a major rant about health insurance companies, specifically Blue Cross Blue Shield.

For a couple of decades, I have been using a drug  to manage my asthma.  My asthma is mild, but it's in need of control.  With the assistance and supervision of my primary care physician, I've gone from having bronchitis several times a year and frequently wheezing, to (knock on wood) going several years between bronchitis episodes, and rarely wheezing.  This is a good thing, a very good thing.

Recently, a generic became available for the drug I've been using (Advair).  And I considered that to also be a good thing.  Unfortunately, we recently changed insurance to Blue Cross Blue Shield.  And apparently, that was a bad thing.

You see, according to Blue Cross Blue Shield's policy on asthma medications, they will not approve Advair OR the new generic for Advair, until/unless the patient has first tried two other asthma medications.  EVEN IF the patient has been on Advair for some time, with good results.  EVEN THOUGH the other medications warn that it may take a bit of time for a patient to begin to feel the full benefit of the other medications.

So I began using the first of the other options.  And this was not a good thing.

I filed an appeal with Blue Cross Blue Shield  (see letter at the bottom of this post), and this evening my primary care physician called me to say she'd been notified by Blue Cross Blue Shield that 'they needed a more complete history' for me.  Mind you... the doctor's office had already submitted a complete history when they requested the authorization for the generic of Advair.  And they've done this many times before, for other patients and other drugs.  So it's not as if they don't know what they're doing.  Whatever the end result of this might be, I find it ridiculous that the group practice my doctor belongs to has to have a staff person whose job is to research and review patient histories and write up requests for authorization.  I find it ridiculous that Blue Cross Blue Shield's actions result in my doctor calling me at 5:30 on a Friday night, to report what she's doing to try to make this work... I know she works long days and she should have better things to do than jump through Blue Cross Blue Shield's hoops.

Yes, I realize some drugs can be outrageously expensive. Yes, I understand that Big-Pharma is partly to blame.  If Big-Pharma is the problem, then Blue Cross Blue Shield should focus their efforts in that direction.  Yes, I'm sure there are doctors out there who will prescribe anything, willy-nilly, without regard to whether there are other options.      If irresponsible doctors are the problem, then Blue Cross Blue Shield should require explanations of why a patient is on a specific drug... Oh wait, they do.  But this just feels too much like the blind application of  a policy, without regard or thought to a specific situation.  Which makes Blue Cross Blue Shield an irresponsible party to all of this.

I feel very fortunate to have a doctor willing to put in the time and effort to see this through.

In the meantime, this is why I hate insurance companies.
Sometimes, tea is not enough, you have to take other action.