In which :@Greybeard: tries to access his HSA


  • Garbage Person

    About three months back the company that runs my HSA stopped accepting SSO from my health insurer and said "everyone now has to register directly on our website. Fine. So I go to register.

    The first page takes the last name, street address, postal code, last 4 digits of SSN, and date of birth. The second takes the last 8 digits of the debit card they issued me. So far, so good.

    The third page asks me to select a username, password (at least 7 characters, at least one digit, at least one letter, no specials, cannot contain userid) entered twice, security question and answer, enter email address, checkbox to accept terms and conditions, initial to agree to something-or-other, and the submit button highlights.

    Click the button...and I get the third page again, with some fields no longer filled in. No error message anywhere on the page. Fill data in again and the submit button now stays disabled.

    I try another browser: same thing.

    I try the "Forgot your username" procedure. It sends me email with "Your username is: 24214b82-179f-4f9b-abb6-e4d42a7a0744".

    Wait until I have time to call customer support during business hours. Eventually get a human. "You know, you can access your account online at..." "Well, apparently not—that's why I'm calling." Agent complements me on the specificity of my problem report and opens a "referral". No, they don't have a ticket id to give me. Wait three to five business days and try again.

    Weeks later, same problem. Again I find time to call. This time the agent says they'll try a "manual registration". They take a callback number and say someone will call me in three to five business days.

    Weeks later, no callback, same problem. Again call. Agent sees the previous referral, but no response. Agent opens another referral.

    A few days later, I get a callback, which goes to voicemail. I call in. Same problem. Agent asks me to shorten my password to eight characters. That works.



  • @Greybeard "Your password can be as long as you want, as long as it's 7 or 8 characters."


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @greybeard said in In which :@Greybeard: tries to access his HSA:

    About three months back the company that runs my HSA stopped accepting SSO from my health insurer and said "everyone now has to register directly on our website. Fine. So I go to register.

    The first page takes the last name, street address, postal code, last 4 digits of SSN, and date of birth. The second takes the last 8 digits of the debit card they issued me. So far, so good.

    The third page asks me to select a username, password (at least 7 characters, at least one digit, at least one letter, no specials, cannot contain userid) entered twice, security question and answer, enter email address, checkbox to accept terms and conditions, initial to agree to something-or-other, and the submit button highlights.

    Click the button...and I get the third page again, with some fields no longer filled in. No error message anywhere on the page. Fill data in again and the submit button now stays disabled.

    I try another browser: same thing.

    I try the "Forgot your username" procedure. It sends me email with "Your username is: 24214b82-179f-4f9b-abb6-e4d42a7a0744".

    Wait until I have time to call customer support during business hours. Eventually get a human. "You know, you can access your account online at..." "Well, apparently not—that's why I'm calling." Agent complements me on the specificity of my problem report and opens a "referral". No, they don't have a ticket id to give me. Wait three to five business days and try again.

    Weeks later, same problem. Again I find time to call. This time the agent says they'll try a "manual registration". They take a callback number and say someone will call me in three to five business days.

    Weeks later, no callback, same problem. Again call. Agent sees the previous referral, but no response. Agent opens another referral.

    A few days later, I get a callback, which goes to voicemail. I call in. Same problem. Agent asks me to shorten my password to eight characters. That works.

    That's pretty good experience for public-financial-medical institution.



  • @mrl said in In which :@Greybeard: tries to access his HSA:

    @greybeard said in In which :@Greybeard: tries to access his HSA:

    About three months back the company that runs my HSA stopped accepting SSO from my health insurer and said "everyone now has to register directly on our website. Fine. So I go to register.

    The first page takes the last name, street address, postal code, last 4 digits of SSN, and date of birth. The second takes the last 8 digits of the debit card they issued me. So far, so good.

    The third page asks me to select a username, password (at least 7 characters, at least one digit, at least one letter, no specials, cannot contain userid) entered twice, security question and answer, enter email address, checkbox to accept terms and conditions, initial to agree to something-or-other, and the submit button highlights.

    Click the button...and I get the third page again, with some fields no longer filled in. No error message anywhere on the page. Fill data in again and the submit button now stays disabled.

    I try another browser: same thing.

    I try the "Forgot your username" procedure. It sends me email with "Your username is: 24214b82-179f-4f9b-abb6-e4d42a7a0744".

    Wait until I have time to call customer support during business hours. Eventually get a human. "You know, you can access your account online at..." "Well, apparently not—that's why I'm calling." Agent complements me on the specificity of my problem report and opens a "referral". No, they don't have a ticket id to give me. Wait three to five business days and try again.

    Weeks later, same problem. Again I find time to call. This time the agent says they'll try a "manual registration". They take a callback number and say someone will call me in three to five business days.

    Weeks later, no callback, same problem. Again call. Agent sees the previous referral, but no response. Agent opens another referral.

    A few days later, I get a callback, which goes to voicemail. I call in. Same problem. Agent asks me to shorten my password to eight characters. That works.

    That's pretty good experience for public-financial-medical institution.

    Yeah. My experiences with the French Assurance Maladie system were less ... positive. It's a long and tortuous story, but:

    I got off lightly. I submitted a request for the bureaucratic flooflah to have a Carte Vitale - an official medical insurance smartcard thing - for myself. In March. In April, I called them, and they told me the supporting documents (copies of birth certificates and passport, that kind of thing) had been detached from the dossier so they could no longer find them. They weren't lost, but they didn't know where they were. :wtf: So I resubmitted the documents, and this time it just worked. In August, I received the card. Job done, and it only took five months.

    My late wife, however, had used the English system of name changes to change her name on multiple occasions, AND was originally a US Citizen, but naturalised British and she had renounced her US citizenship. The bureaucrats couldn't get their heads round this, even though we provided all the documents necessary to prove it. In English AND in officially-stamped translation.

    After three years of back and forth, including trips to see an avocado(1), we finally got them to see sense, and they produced a card for her. The really distressing part was that after she passed away, I went to tell them she had gone. I had all the documents, and it took twenty minutes of queuing and ten seconds of talking to a bureaucrat to get rid of the card.

    (1) In French, the word for lawyer and the word for avocado are both "avocat". Read into that what you wish.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @steve_the_cynic said in In which :@Greybeard: tries to access his HSA:

    (1) In French, the word for lawyer and the word for avocado are both "avocat". Read into that what you wish.

    🥑


  • 🚽 Regular

    @steve_the_cynic said in In which :@Greybeard: tries to access his HSA:

    They weren't lost, but they didn't know where they were.

    http://www.quotes.net/quote/321



  • @steve_the_cynic said in In which :@Greybeard: tries to access his HSA:

    and it took twenty minutes of queuing and ten seconds of talking to a bureaucrat to get rid of the card.

    Obviously, they front-loaded the process. If you'd gotten the card right away, you'd probably still be trying to convince them she was gone.



  • @dcon said in In which :@Greybeard: tries to access his HSA:

    @steve_the_cynic said in In which :@Greybeard: tries to access his HSA:

    and it took twenty minutes of queuing and ten seconds of talking to a bureaucrat to get rid of the card.

    Obviously, they front-loaded the process. If you'd gotten the card right away, you'd probably still be trying to convince them she was gone.

    Maybe. All I did was explain that she had passed away and here was her card and the "acte de décès" (death certificate, but like everything in French bureaucracy, there are weird complications(1)), and the person took them and explained that they would take care of everything.

    In general, if you're doing something ordinary, French bureaucracy is relatively non-intrusive, but it becomes abruptly barrierish if you step even a couple of millimetres outside that "ordinary". I'm told that it used to be much worse, and that the tax people were the worst, but that they are much improved.

    (1) In particular, it isn't the document that the doctor signs. That happens, then it goes to the mairie (town hall) of the commune (town, village, or segment of a large city, NOT a dwelling for a group of hippies) where the person died and they produce the final document. And there's some fun and games if the deceased died outside the commune where he/she lived, but the funeral directors take care of all that for you.

    EDIT: and of course a week or so later I got a letter from the US Embassy to ask me for more details, since they had heard that a US citizen had died. (Someone in the mairie or in the hospice had seen 'place of birth: El Paso, Texas' and jumped to incorrect conclusions.) I dug the relevant paperwork out of my files, and called them to explain that while she had been a US citizen, she had renounced it in the early 90s, but I could send them copies of the declarations if that would help? Yes, it would, and thanks.


  • Garbage Person

    @djls45 said in In which :@Greybeard: tries to access his HSA:

    @Greybeard "Your password can be as long as you want, as long as it's 7 or 8 characters."

    hunter2


  • Impossible Mission - B

    @greybeard What sort of password is ******* ??? There's no entropy there whatsoever!


  • :belt_onion:

    @masonwheeler said in In which :@Greybeard: tries to access his HSA:

    @greybeard What sort of password is ******* ??? There's no entropy there whatsoever!

    Sorry, hunter3


  • Impossible Mission - B

    @sloosecannon Yeah, that's much better!


  • kills Dumbledore

    @masonwheeler said in In which :@Greybeard: tries to access his HSA:

    @greybeard What sort of password is ******* ??? There's no entropy there whatsoever!

    My first attempts at breaking into computers were when I was in primary school and our school got its first PC. Probably Win3.1, but maybe 95.

    There was a login screen which asked for a password and I noticed that whatever I typed it just showed a *. I decided that logically, that meant it was reading the * as well, and that all I had to try was *, **, *** etc.

    Once I got past about 10 characters I started to realise that I might have missed something


Log in to reply