fast, days 3 and 4

Forgive me, I've been remiss in posting. It's been a long Thursday and Friday at work. I work at a health insurance brokerage that's used a third-party call center broker to write its business. We have partnerships with different associations and companies that drive business to us. The third-party broker gets the call, sells the policy, and earns a percentage of the commission. It's not been working out so well for my company as this other broker has allegedly been reporting bogus numbers to our partner associations and to us. There's a strong chance that they are writing most of the policies under their broker number and writing a minimum amount of business under ours. Because of all of this, our relationship with this broker has been terminated and we're starting up our own call center. I use the term call center loosely, there's only 3 of us staffing it at first. There's been a lot to do, though: setting up the phone system, setting up the computers and workstations, and familiarizing and training ourselves on the contact manager/agency manager software. We've also been dealing with insurance carriers to get appointed to sell their products and training ourselves on those products. This has been particularly difficult as we will be writing business in all 50 states, and each state has its own laws. That means that each product varies from state to state. It also means that just because we're appointed with, say, Assurant Health to sell their products, it doesn't mean that we can sell Assurant products in all the states they offer their products in until the state tells Assurant, who then tells us, that we can. It's an arduous process. We're finally going live on Monday, and I'm excited about that.

***The next section discusses some bodily functions/processes that you may find unsavory. Read with caution!***

Anyway, back to the fast. It's been relatively uneventful physically. I thought I would be irritable, and I haven't been at all. Thursday night I did get ravenously hungry and I ordered a Papa Johns pizza online. A couple minutes after placing the order I called and canceled it. I have had mild hunger pangs since then, but they pass quickly. I thought that I wouldn't have any past day 3. I continue to take psyllium husk, whatever that is, to keep me regular. It takes terrible and when mixed with water the lumpy texture almost makes me gag when it slides down my throat. It's better than constipation, though. It is strange to have a bowel movement that's smaller than my 35 lb beagle. In my reading before the fast, I was surprised to learn that I would still have bowel movements on a juice fast. Apparently the body takes the small amount of fiber and wastes from the digested juice and combines them with bile and bilirubin, which is made up from dead red blood cells. Exciting, I know.

More tonight or tomorrow.