Thursday, February 2, 2012

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

Lies.

It says here that your policy has been cancelled for over a year, Ma'am, just like you said.  I do not know why you have been sent a renewal notice. 

So spoke Julie, the lovely lady who answered the phone yesterday at our ex-insurance agents office.  We ditched the agent, a year ago, because of his poor communication skills and terrible record-keeping - it seems nothing has changed! 

Your policy is still active, and we did receive payment for the full amount last January, Ma'am, this is why we have sent you a renewal notice.

So spoke Jenny, Julie's manager, about 20 minutes later when she called me back.  Clearly both women cannot be speaking the truth...and so I tried to explain 'but my mortgage company says that they did NOT pay you, and I know I didn't, because I paid Pemco instead. 

If you send us the insurance document from your new company, we will issue you with a refund for policy you had with us last year.

Ooh, well, I'll be quiet about believing that I didn't pay it then.  The jury, however, is still out on the possibility of there being any truth in her statement, I'll let you know what happens...

Damned Lies

You have walked 672 steps so far today.

So claimed my little pedometer when I got home from the morning school run.  I use the word 'run' loosely, since I really mean 'drive'. 

Not true, says I, since I clipped the pedometer on and reset it to zero right before I walked out the door this morning, took an absolute maximum of about 80 steps and got in the car.  When I got home, I checked the pedometer to make sure that I HAD reset it after yesterday's thousands of steps.  672.  It seems that the pedometer also counts bumps in the road, which is very bad news on our terrible tarmac!  And so I have an indeterminate number of steps to deduct from my total, since I have no way of knowing just how many it racked up per car trip today...

Statistics

If you get an excellent score on the PSAT, you can expect to get spammed by dozens of colleges, all begging you to apply! 

Rebecca took the PSAT a few weeks ago, because the students who score highest can win money to help pay for college, so all the kids in her class take it every year.  Since the results were issued she has been receiving daily emails from colleges and early entrance programs all over the country - and today even our snail mail box was under attack from The Bard School at St Simons, wherever that might be - an information packet bearing the question 'if you had a chance to leave high school and go on to college early, would you take it?' to which, of course, the answer is already a resounding YES but clearly The Bard has not yet received notice of WHERE Rebecca was when she took the PSAT test.  She's already on campus, people, you are too late. 

Methinks there may have been a teeny tiny little box somewhere on the front cover of the test booklet that said something like 'tick here if you do not want to receive mail from every college and university in the contiguous 48' - it is possible that Becca did NOT tick this box!  Luckily she is young enough to enjoy the attention of being spammed by the .edu community, and I'm thankful for the firestarting materials, so it's a win for us, but not so much for the colleges.  With all this paper flying around the country every time the PSAT results are issued, you'd think the Post Office would be turning a profit, but the statistics show that it isn't so...

Today's challenge was about being sure to drink enough fluids, so I'm off to get a cuppa, want one? 

2 comments:

  1. Omigosh Debbie... Same with Livia. She took the PSAT in October - and rocked it I might add :) Every day I get about 6 emails and now they have started through snail mail as well.

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    1. Go Livia! The pressure is huge on them, though, it seems a lot for them to carry when they're still so young. Becca's class have turned it into a joke and they're running a book - seeing how many colleges they can 'collect' as a group, just for fun. Reassuring to see that they really ARE this talented though, sometimes along the way the prejudice of others can make a parent wonder whether maybe they have imagined the whole thing! Hope Ash is settling in well xx

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