But we just returned from a medical appointment. Here, why don’t you look at the new dates for Mitch Ryder while we tell you all about it.

Like many companies, we’ve been through several employee health plans. Heck, during the dot-com boom, we had the best medical care money could buy, including full prescription and dental as well as full psychiatric, which really came in handy when we were dealing with the concert industry in regards to additional dates for Motley Crue or new tours for Fishbone and Gavin DeGraw. From ingrown toenails to full-frontal lobotomies, we were covered 100 percent.

But those days are gone, and as the dot-com economy crashed and burned, we were forced to look for a new health provider. Sure, we tried several insurance plans, but none of them could understand the underlying medical idiosyncrasies involved with researching tours by Keith Urban, BR549 and Loretta Lynn. Some couldn’t comprehend why we needed so much OxyContin, while other medical providers felt that all our problems could be resolved by rigorous electroshock therapy. Plus, when surgery was deemed necessary, not one of the plans covered the cost of anesthetics. Clearly, a change was needed.

So we looked and we searched. We shopped for doctors in Florida and we interviewed pharmacists in Tijuana, but alas, we couldn’t find a health provider that could even come close to providing the same excellent medical care we had become accustomed to during the dot-com gravy train. Meanwhile, we had tours to enter, like the schedules for Danzig and GWAR, while the injuries, broken bones and damaged psyches piled up like so many rumors about U2’s upcoming tour.

However, that’s all in the past, for now we have a health care provider that we can afford. A health care provider that considers concert info to be the same as cash, and all we need do is include a few dates for Thin Lizzy or Ekoostik Hookah as a co-payment, and we’re in like Flynn. Of course, it’s not exactly like the health care we received during the boom. The flu shots are for the previous year’s strain, and the tongue depressors aren’t nearly as new, but it’s a health plan, and a pretty darn good one at that. It helps keep the fevers down and the pulses thumping while we slave away entering new dates for Rogue Wave and The Frames.

However, there is one small problem regarding our new health plan.

Some of us still haven’t gotten used to the leeches. Guess you just can’t please everybody.