Thread by @UrsulaV

Many moons ago, the first job I worked out of college was at Prudential Insurance, reading claim forms for a class action lawsuit. There were literally hundreds of thousands of twenty-page handwritten answers scanned into the computers.

How did the insurance agent defraud you? What exactly did he say? How do you feel about it?

We would then grade them from 0-3 based on how defrauded they were and Prudential would give them a paid-up insurance policy.

It was there that I learned firsthand that corporate America is completely batshit. For example, Prudential (Pru) needed to show the auditors they were getting cases out the door, so they required everyone to complete 18 cases a week.

But there was a catch. A Very Weird catch.

See, in many of these cases, people had been sold a policy where the money you paid in premiums was invested in the stock market, and the theory was that your gains from the stock market would eventually pay the premiums on the policy, which would then get reinvested, etc.

This policy was nicknamed “The Abbreviator.” It was very, very popular in the 80’s, which is why, in the grim light of 1998, a bunch of us were reading these claim forms.

Now, the sensible thing to do would have been to look at the face value of the policy, do a quick equation about how many years they paid, and cut them a check. But no. Then Pru might give someone too much money!

So each case needed a thing called “funding.” And funding was like...hypothetical math. We were handed printouts of how much they paid in, and then we had to determine how much money they would have made IF the system had worked AS IT WAS SOLD TO THEM.

So we are literally going through handscanned printouts trying to pull out the numbers, and then massaging them based on our understanding, from the handwritten form, of exactly what the unscrupulous agent had said.

There is no “correct” answer to a math problem like that. It could take DAYS. So, sensibly enough, they made a team called “Funding” who did all the weird math and sent it on to us.

But the problem was that once Funding had worked on it, that was one of their 18 cases a week.

And over in claims, we still need our 18 cases a week to please our corporate overlords. But if Funding had it, it was one of their 18. We don’t get to count it, because remember, we have to be doing unique cases in order to make the total number of the lawsuit go down.

You don’t get your 18 cases a week for a couple weeks running, you are in deep shit. So over in claims, we’re pulling up a case, seeing Funding already touched it, and dumping it back in the queue.

There are only so many cases in the queue and if Funding already had their mitts on it, nobody in Claims wants to touch it because it doesn’t do anything for our numbers, and the team leads are in, like, savage competition to keep their numbers or they have to sack people.

Which means the one thing every team lead wants is FRESH CASES. Basically the cases that have just been scanned in from whoever the poor bastards with the bulk scanner are.

Reader, they are treating these case numbers like street drugs. “We need cases? You got any cases?”

“C’moooon, my guys need cases! You have extras! C’mon! I’ll buy you lunch/wax your car/be your best friend.”

I kid you not, I saw team leads weeping with joy and embracing when new lists of case numbers came in.

But, of course, the system now also works in reverse. If I get a case that needs funding (not all of them were The Abbreviator) and I send it to Funding, they’re not gonna touch it because that’s one of my 18. So anything that requires two departments is stuck.

But Claims was bigger. And Claims was now showing more numbers being done, so they got assigned more cases.

Which are then going to Funding. And sitting, because Funding is desperate to make up its numbers now.

After about six months of this, as you might imagine, the entire system collapsed.

(If there hasn’t been over a hundred thousand claim forms, I expect it would have crashed sooner.)

Now, the logical thing to do would be to stop making everyone personally responsible for the inane metric of 18 cases a week and just focus on getting the damn things finished.

But c’mon, deprive corporate of their one wild and precious metric? Naaah.

Instead they decided to abolish Funding (which now had a terrible backlog and bad numbers) and make everyone in Claims do the complex math for their own cases.

This...did not go well.

We were temps. We had literally been hired for being able to decipher scanned handwriting and type the number 0-3 in a box.

This was complex accounting, and it went to hell so fast that we didn’t have time for a handbasket.

During the all hands meeting announcing this change, one brave soul asked “Do you want these done fast, or do you want them done right?”

And I shall never forget the corporate shill who said “Well, the numbers show that the less time spent on a case, the more likely it is to be right! So do both!”

The possibility that some cases might be quick and easy and others very long and complex? Naaaaah.

It went about as well as you’d expect from taking the math away from the math people and handing it to us. Our document retention boxes began to fill shipping containers that were sitting on the edge of the parking lot. We were firmly chastised for putting trash in the boxes.

They say that in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. That’s an inane saying because if everyone is blind, presumably the infrastructure caters to it. Nevertheless, my basic math skills and ability to understand lying liars that lie made me briefly valuable.

I was therefore trained on The Widget.

The widget was a drop down menu on the computer, treated with fear and awe by all within the company. With the widget, you could do math on the Big Cases.

The ones that had been sold to doctors, lawyers, politicians. The BIG money.

The man who trained me on The Widget then quit. Leaving me the lone soul in an office of several hundred who could run the numbers on these cases.

Which, need I remind you, still only counted as one of my 18 a week and had I been hit by a bus, they would have been up a creek.

Eventually they asked me to train people on other teams, but they would always send their biggest losers to me because they didn’t want to pull a good worker off production for several days while they got up to speed. Just who you want on a big case!

Meanwhile, I successfully broke the Widget.

I had a peaceful week reading at my desk until someone somewhere fixed the code.

A day came, reader, when I finished one of those big cases and I gazed upon the number which I had come up with for the payout.

It was a multi-million dollar number, and no one in the company knew how to check my math. I was 21 and had pulled straight D’s in math for years.

And I took a deep breath, and I thought “Well, it’s not my money,” and I cut the check.

Some months later they downsized me, but they gave me a nice severance that apparently included a policy or a tenth of a stock option or something. I still get letters telling me to collect it, except I can’t, because I don’t have an account with them, because it was 1998.

I have talked to real live humans who gaze in baffled horror at the age of this…whatever it is…and finally tell me that since of course I don’t have an account because it predates the accounts, I would need to provide pay stubs from 1998 in order to prove it’s really me.

I have no idea if anyone, after I left, ever knew what to do with The Widget.

ETA: For this job where I was allowed to cut multimillion dollar checks, my take home pay was approximately $800 a month, or $9600 a year.

I had one annual review, where I was told that my attitude needed work and thus did not get a raise. I was, however, given a stress ball.