Phone Calls and Children

My insurance company has this fabulous feature right now, which I assume is to try to reduce the cost of paying for medications.  After refilling a script so many times, it rejects it, and tells the pharmacy to tell you to order it through the mail.
There are several annoying facets to this.
1.)  You find out it is rejected when you are at the pharmacy attempting to pick it up and have like one pill left.
2.)  You usually have a kid or two with you.
3.)  You have to call and override the rejection and tell them you don't want it through mail order.
4.)  The mail order might be cheaper but it takes three weeks to process (by when you may not need the meds anymore) and also, they send you three months at a time and insurance will cover one or two of those months.  Or you have to call the doctor to rewrite the script.
5.)  You have to have the prescription number on hand when overriding which often means calling the pharmacy back again.

Of course I realized all this when I got down to my last birth control pill and remembered vaguely paying out-of-pocket last time and putting the "override" phone call on my to-do list.

So today I made the phone call and remembered why I hadn't done it before.  This time I remembered to get the prescription number ahead of time, when I called the pharmacy to ask again for the number of who I had to call.

I finally get the number and call.
Sam appears, "mama."  I wag my finger at him and shake my head.  It's an automated line.
"Mama."
"Sam, no.  I'm on the phone."
Viv starts whimpering on the rug.
I pick her up and respond to the voice activated prompt.
"Mama."
"Sam, NOT NOW."
"We did not understand your response.  Please listen to your options again."
"Mama.  Am I going to the doctor?"
Viv screeches.
"We did not understand your response.  Please listen to your options again."

I hang up and lecture Sam and try again.

This time Viv continuously does her happy screech which continuously sets off the voice automated machine.  I hang up and stick the binky in her mouth and put her back down.  Sam is still quiet in the corner.

I call back get through the entire menu which of course turns out has no options for wanting to override their stupid system so I end up asking for an operator and getting transferred (five minutes later).  Then I get put on hold while the override is being performed for another 3 minutes.  When the representative returns, I ask her who to call to stop this process from starting.  She doesn't know.  Viv starts screeching which causes Sam to realize he's not making any noise, so he starts playing his instruments, because of course that is not actually talking to me, so it's acceptable behavior.  I attempt to tell the representative how annoying it is to have to go through this process.  She doesn't care or possibly understand.  I hang up, it's been about 25 minutes since I started the phone call and it's now only 9:30 am and I have to take both the kids to the grocery store, plus still don't have my prescription.  Honestly it would probably be easier to get it in the mail, if we received all of our mail and it was covered by insurance.






This is one of her quieter squeaks and is actually her distress call.  She's discovered that her binky is missing.