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This is a receipt you don’t see too often… Free Coffee! If you’re up at 05:05 that’s just a nice thing that makes me go, ahhhhh.

I was raised as a military brat, growing up in the sixties. I had integrated schools from Kindergarten on, and was fairly oblivious to what racism even was. Race, color, seldom even came up in our family, and never in a bad way. My father formed my attitude towards other people… treat everyone equally and treat everyone with respect. I went to the “day room” with him many times while he was a drill sergeant on Ft. Benning in the early sixties and I saw first hand how he treated soldiers of all ethnic backgrounds. Always with authority and respect.

Although I was aware of the major news events happening in the world as a child, I was a child, more interested in what affected me personally at any given moment. When I looked at news events like the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Kennedys, it made me sad that I would have to grow up someday.

In 1972 when Dad retired and we moved back to Columbus, I entered the 7th grade in a public school, and for the first time in my life I saw racial hatred displayed regularly. It made me sick… it made no more sense to me than to single out everyone with small feet, or red hair, and consider them less than you for that reason only.

From 72 through the time I graduated in 76, it only grew worse.  There were riots every year around MLK’s birthday, as blacks marched and protested for recognition of Dr. King with a national holiday. I can tell you from seeing it with my own eyes, none of the protests I saw ever turned into a riot until the marchers were met with resistance from ignorent racists.

These and other related events forever cemented in me a hatred for discrimination of any kind that strips fellow human beings of rights we all should have and enjoy.

I look forward to a day when The Dream is realized.

• “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”
• “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
• “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.”
• “This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.”
• “Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.”
• “Let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring—when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children—black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics—will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

(Key excerpts from the speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, August 28th, 1963)

No doubt there are many people who like their job or career, however very few people end up doing what they love as their job.  Be it dumb luck, hard work, skillful maneuvering, or a combo of all – I am fortunate to be among that number.

What is it about me that makes me want to take 3 million lines of unintelligible text and convert it into a smart, fast and usable list, that can be sorted, filtered, and grouped so as to reveal hidden information amounting to more than the sum of the original list?  I honestly don’t know but it consumes me.

My parent company, Wellpoint (Blue Cross Blue Shield, Anthem, Unicare, etc…) Is going through a lot right now. Over the last few years MY part of the company has gone from BCBS of Georgia, to a subsidiary of Wellpoint, and then Wellpoint and Anthem merged to create the largest health insurer in America.  As a result of all this growing and merging, every location in every state uses different systems to receive claims and process them. They use different systems to receive calls, process requests or inquiries. With reporting requirements going from local to national so quickly, the challenges are enormous.

This has come to light in some recent audit issues. We audit internally and externally for everything… balancing calls received to the communication logs that are made for each call; insuring each call was handled to customer satisfaction; balancing claims received with claims paid; how long all these things take to do. Then we compile all of this into many (many many) reports.

One of the largest growth potentials for us is the Senior Sector, the up and coming boomers (me).  Over the past 6 months some of our audit troubles have come from the lack of good reporting in this line of business. The lack of good reporting stemmed from the fore mentioned differences in data systems at each location. The challenge is that the mainframe programming in one state only counted inquiries in 2 categories. Zero to 10 days, and >10 days. That sucks when another state’s mainframe counts 0-5, 6-10, 11-15, etc… and Medicare wants you to report 0-7, 8-14, 15-21 days. Major reprogramming and testing on the fly is required because we can’t stop business as usual.

So, that paired with some other issues caused Medicare to slap a restraint on us last week – we cannot sell any NEW Medicare supplement or Pharmacy (Part D) business until we straighten it out.

My new department includes what we call Senior Services, which is all of our Medicare business. My job is collecting and forming all the data into analyzable chunks and reports. My biggest project of late is a database to collect data from all the systems, and normalize it so we can report accurate and timely information. I am nearing completion and it has been a challenge, but as I said in opening, I love it.

This is the coolest thing I’ve ever been paid to do. (Shooting lasers from an F4 fighter jet cockpit was cool, but there was no future in it.)

If you are not totally bored by now, you might be a data analyst.