When the receptionist deigned to appear, ten minutes past my 8:00 am appointment, cheerily asking how everyone was, I said loudly, "You're late."
Silence. Several late-coming jump-the-line patients edged over to her desk, so I called out "You're not going to ignore the clipboard on which everyone signed in order of arrival, are you?"
"Let me boot up the computer," she said.
"If you hadn't arrived late that would be done already," I replied.
What is wrong with these people?
They can't make an appointment even if you're sick for less than three weeks later, but when you arrive you have to wait for their royal highnesses to give you the service you pay for? There's 10 percent unemployment out there and it's catching.
OK, part of it is that it's an HMO, Kaiser Permanente, to be precise. "Better than nothing," as a cab driver told me. Not much.
Kaiser is imperious and quixotic with its rates, but short on service. They remind me of Helen Hunt's famous scene in As Good As It Gets:
CAROL (HH): Fucking HMO bastard pieces of shit... I'm sorry...Health pseudoreform or not, I refuse to wait any more. If they make an appointment, they keep it.
DR. BETTES: No. Actually, I think that's their technical name.
4 comments:
"L'exactitude est la politesse des rois." Doctors are not kings but they believe they are your saviors, with the right of life and death.
Customer service at the doctor, etc, doesn't seem to exist any more. When you try to buy something, the sales' attendent can't wait on you because she/he is busy on the cell phone talking to friends. You feel like you are interrupting the person if you want to buy something or ask a question.
Amen! That has always irritated me, too. My time is just as important as anyone else's!
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I have never understood why their time is more valuable than mine, and also why I must treat doctors reverentially and use their titles at all times, even when they are half my age, or they won't treat me well, while they are free to call me by my first name as if I were a child or a Collie.
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