Benefits restored

At my work I recently had my benefits terminated because if a leave of abscence goes beyond the first day of a month they are automatically terminated. I tried calling in beforehand to make sure that sort of thing wouldn't happen but all they would say is something along the lines of "you should be fine, it only matters if your leave is like 30 days long". My HR manager tells me she often has to call several times in a row to get proper information so this isn't really anything surprising. Ironically, I officially was back to work on the 1st of the month, but the 1st just so happened to be my normal scheduled day off. I called in beforehand to see if I needed to come in on the 31st or if I should wait till the 2nd, but was told don't worry about it by my manager who according to job description isn't supposed to know anything about or be involved in benefits stuff that would influence that decision. Since there was both corporate HR and local management making mistakes causing the problem to happen, corporate was willing to fix it. Not that that improves my opinion of them much any. I called in to find out the status of the case that had been submitted and the guy spent probably 5 minutes just arguing with me that it was somehow against policy or unethical for me to be calling in to find out what was going on. All I asked was "what's the status of my case?" and he was much more interested in lecturing me on that only managers could have cases submitted and when I told him my HR manager did it he demanded to know who my HR manager was... the guy was really not the type that should be employed in a service type position.

But in any case, I can now have followup visits for my surgery, Bonnie can have physicals, and something else can go catastrophically wrong with our heath this year without it totally ruining our finances. Feels wonderful.