Vacc-a-Mole

[captainsblog]

Nobody said this would be easy.  Nonetheless, they rather underestimated the degree of difficulty.

It falls within a well-known psychological term:  Reactance occurs when a person feels that someone or something is taking away their choices or limiting the range of alternatives.  It's a primal-brain reaction to suddenly realizing that a thing you don't have, which you were logically and emotionally fine with not having, is now heightened in importance after you realize it's become something you can't have.

For me, that thing was the vaccine. As soon as the state opened up eligibility to comorbidities, I followed the rules and was perfectly happy with getting a first appointment scheduled seven weeks and 200 miles away. Then came Friday's missed opportunity, promptly followed by a Saturday morning of seeing numerous assorted happy posts from friends who'd gotten, or at least had imminent scheduling for, their vaccinations.  That, and assorted news reports of new places to get the thing/ about expanded supply/ of a new site to track possible sites, and even this, from the current week's New Yorker about a Fairy Godmother to the Infirm who acts as a volunteer concierge to get people through the process:


The vaccine booking process has been likened to Soviet bread lines, or to the Massapequa D.M.V. But these comparisons fail to capture the particularly digital nature of the bureaucratic dystopia. There are too many Web sites to check, and not enough people answering phones. Portals crash, confirmed appointments vanish. Slots go not to the most at risk but to the most tech-savvy. People could use some I.T. support. A designated grandkid? Millennial concierge?  “I prefer ‘vaccine yenta,’” Carolyn Ruvkun, who has secured about a hundred appointments for friends and strangers, and sent links and tips to many more, said the other day.

So after returning from a quick office trip yesterday morning, and knowing I had nothing else I specifically had to do in or out of the house (this will be important later:P), I planted my ass in front of this screen and started playing with the various alternatives. Originally, the Do As I Was Told site was the only one I'd been checking- the one which schedules the state-run sites from UB to Jones Beach, with a variety in between including state and county fairgrounds, several SUNY campuses, a huge NYC convention center, and at least one racetrack/casino.

Try using this site for awhile and you realize you're just as well off putting a two dollar bet on Beetlebaum....

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So the new track-the-sites site is called vaccinefinder.org. It's run by Boston Children's Hospital with CDC support. You can supposedly get a list of sites within 50 miles of a designated zip code, but the lists I got were of places all within about ten.  The local UB site was there, just linking back uselessly to the same state site I'd been banging about on already; the rest were pharmacies of mostly corporate stripes. Numerous Walmarts (all out of stock), one localish Mom-and-Pop (I got on a waitlist), and the rest were all RiteAids and Walgreenses.

RiteAid is the successor to a number of smaller regional chains including Fay's and Genovese, which is why I used to call them the Mafia Factory Outlet. Hey- maybe some Pfizer vaccines might fall off a truck!  Alas, even though they said local pharmacies were in stock, once I tried a specific location it told me sorry, no can do, and sent me to an interactive showing their closest availabilities to be in Pennsylvania.  Originally, I was not going to rule these out, since Erie is closer to here than Syracuse by a mile (more like 100 of them), but if I did do that, I'd be restricted from entering numerous work-related places on account of my having left the great State of New York.

Walgreens was, in its way, worse. The dot.org site said their closest pharmacy had available appointments, but on clicking through to their site, I discovered that you couldn't schedule unless you had an online account with them. Amazingly, I did; I have no recollection of when or why, but there it was.  Then the Vacc-a-Mole game commenced in earnest:

- Enter zip code, which defaults to the 14201 for this whole area. Put ours. Be told nothing is available. (They did offer an option to be notified of future openings, but to get that you'd have to opt-in to emails from them, specifically including marketing emails.  No thanks.)

- Enter zip code again. Nothing.

- Fiddle with some different zip codes: a 146 from our old neighborhood. Nada.  A 140 for in between here and Rochester. Zippo.

- Repeat, ad nauseum.




Finally, our actual zip code worked! A March 2nd appointment at the closest Walgreens to our house! Strike up the band!

Or not: confirmation required also scheduling the second dose at the same time, and they had no available appointments for that.

Oh, and remember the bit about needing to have an account with them? Every 10 minutes or so, they'd log you out of that, so if you spent any time doing anything other than this madness, you'd have to start over from the beginning.

I was pretty grumpy about the whole thing by the end of the day, and with Eleanor coming off the side effects of the first dose from Friday, the feeling was mutual. But we did enjoy a sweet little Maggie Smith/Timothy Spall film from the Downton Abbey creator that ended the day more happily, if a little spookily.  Tomorrow is another day, I said.

And it was. Only today, it is.

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One of the pieces of advice from that article about the COVID Concierge was to start bright and early, so I was up before walkies and checking back with the various places. The state and Wegmans sites had nothing new, but Walgreens revealed dozens of this-week availabilities in neighboring Tonawanda!....

but, again, with no second appointment available there:P  This time, though, I noticed I could fiddle with the zip code for booking the second owie. I ran through the 14XXX zip series from 140 (Batavia) to my good old 14850, but finally 14901 (Elmira) produced one actually a little closer to home- in Corning, on March 31. Still closer and sooner than the first one I'd snagged earlier.  So I booked it- only to notice that my Walgreens login was so old, they'd sent the email to a Buffalo Freenet address that doesn't exist anymore:P

But I printed it, confirmation numbers and all, so I'm going Wednesday morning on a short drive for the first poke. I'll sort the email issue when I get there and see if they can move up the second.

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That left just enough time to get Pepper on her Sunday rendezvous with other pups. Not quite enough, though, because when I got out to my car, left in the driveway for over 18 hours, I discovered I'd left JARVIS's lights on and his battery was quite the dead thing.  I switched over to Eleanor's car for the trip, and backed hers in on returning so I could try jumping mine with hers.  The Hyundai is a plug-in hybrid, but as with other electric/hybrids we've had, the interior stuff runs off a separate 12-volt battery under the hood that is essentially the same as the one in an all-gas vehicle.

Only problem was that hers had no obvious + and - terminals to connect the jumper cables to, and her manual only described how to jump her car, not how to use it as the assisting one. Plus her battery looked more like a fusebox than a traditional car type, and I did not want to take chances having zero working cars.

This is when I remembered that the AAA membership expired a few months ago- and the renewal form for it was on my desk at work.  I tried going online to renew, and got this:


 
Fortunately, I remembered that Eleanor had once used the manufacturer's Roadside Assistance program to fix her earlier version of a Smart car, and I found the number for it in one of JARVIS's seven manuals.  Although they are no longer selling the car here, Mercedes is still offering this service, and within an hour, a driver with a portable charger had him back up and running without trying to sell me a new battery like the AAA guy always does.  He's now safely in the garage for the rest of the day, and the lights, dammit, are OFF.

Maybe I should take up video games, now that I'll have so little to do in front of this computer:P