Scrappy Blog

So, I walked into clinic this afternoon (i started at lunchtime) and the nurse manager of the clinic approached and said “I hear you had a nice call last night!”

My first thought was that the call service had contacted her with an apology.  But, no, it turns out that a really pissed off psychologist was calling because her pager was going off all friggin’ long with calls for our clinic….

It just occurred to me that if I’d been clever, I could have paged that (transposed) number early in the weekend and told the recipient to call me directly if she was bothered again.  Then I’d have known to raise h*** with the call center earlier on.  On the other hand, the call center supervisor I spoke to Saturday never quite admitted that the number in her system was wrong, so I’d have been going out on a limb there.

Saturday morning I had frustration with the call service, as detailed in my last note.  However, it seemed reasonable the problem was solved:

• The call service supervisor had identified that the digits were transposed in her system,
• She’d successfully paged me five times with that system, and
• She promised that for the rest of the weekend, the service would contact me within 30 minutes by phone after each call, to be sure it got through. (this last one was sure to make me miserable but it seemed better than missing an important call.  The alternative would be to have them call me directly – but I wanted to test the pager system as well)

So life seemed good.  Had a long stretch with no calls Saturday but a call to the service verified there really weren’t any calls. Had some calls come through normally Sunday morning.

So then there was a long stretch Sunday with no calls.  At this point, I thought we’d identified the problem and seen it working properly, so I was willing to believe it was just a quiet time. Silly me.

After dinner yesterday, my phone rings. It’s a supervisor (a different one) from the call center, asking why I’m not responding to my calls.  We go through the whole thing again, he checks the system, and… lookee here!  The last two digits of your phone number are transposed in the system! Gee, how could that happen?

I was pissed, frankly.  Even more so when I discovered there were two calls that had been waiting, for hours, because no one followed the instructions to call my home phone.  And one had profuse bleeding and the other had possible appendicitis – neither needed to be kept waiting for hours!

So I’ll be making some formal complaints today. This is ridiculous.

Call is really not easier when the call service is incompetent.  After a long stretch of no calls I contacted them to see what was up.  “Oh, we’ve paged you five times, didn’t you get them?” …no, and since my pager keeps a record of the calls it received, I feel confident I truly didn’t get them, as opposed to just sleeping through them or something.  “Oh, that explains why someone else was calling us and telling us we have the wrong person!”  Um… and you didn’t bother to call my home number to figure out why that was happening? And you act surprised that I didn’t get the pages, when you had proof already they’d gone to someone else?

They read off my pager number to me; they had two numbers transposed.  What’s weird is they were paging me successfully yesterday, and got another through this AM – but they claim they’re using an automated system, so I can’t assume they have a dyslexic operator causing all the fuss.

Result after catching up on all the calls I missed: one of them was a valid thing to call about.  The others were people who had their symptoms earlier in the week but simply couldn’t be bothered to do anything about them until Saturday morning.  I told them to continue the things they’d been doing all week, come see us during business hours Monday, and go to an urgent care center over the weekend if they simply couldn’t stand to wait until Monday.

Perhaps I’m unreasonable. To me, people who call a doctor after-hours entirely because of convenience are incredibly rude, and I feel very little motivation to go out of my way to make their lives easier. 

Sigh.  First night of weekend call down; two more to go… Monday morning can’t come fast enough…

So I have this little cat. Increasingly little, in fact, because she eats very little and has to be tempted to eat even that.  Which is typical of many old people so I guess it can be typical of an old cat as well. And if I’ve been at work all day, she’ll ignore food in favor of cuddling as close to me as she can, all evening long.

I think it’s worth the odor of trout feast next to my chair, if it’ll get a few calories into my rapidly disappearing cat….

I often see people put lengthy posts behind a “cut” so that they can shorten the piece that ends up on their friends’ list.  I like the idea but haven’t quite figured out how it works. So this is an attempt at creating a LJ cut:

I’m in clinic all day today and I’m on call tonight.  On call all weekend, actually.

So, I’m thinking from time to time I’ll report a story that seems unreasonable from my point of view, and see what others think about it. Not sure why I’m announcing it in this way… fair warning, I guess.

I am noticing I am too responsive to criticism, and that it seriously impairs my productivity.

I get negative feedback about work I’m doing, and it’s really hard to go back and keep working on that project.  This is a serious handicap.

Not sure what to do about it, though…

Meanwhile, a couple of my friends seem to have this incredibly high impression of my productivity and competence.  They also make me feel like a poser. I wish I was as dynamic and successful as they seem to think I am.

Again, not sure what to do about that.  Kicking myself in the pants and telling myself to get to work just seems to have the “criticism” effect on me.

Well, I sent email to their customer service people – which I’ve done before and never got any reply.  But this time, I implied in my email that I was representing a large group of people, all of whom really wanted a map.  I got the following reply:

“Thank you for contacting METRO. Our METRO RideStores have the large fold out maps for free. The closest one to you is located downtown at 1900 Main, right next to the Downtown Transit Center. You can jump on METRORail and be there in a few minutes from the Texas Medical Center. If you would like to order a large quantity, please contact Eric Atkinson in our Distribution Office at 712-739-3728.”

Found myself thinking of the idiocy of the Houston Metro (public transportation), thought I’d rant a bit. The service is moderately well used, and after considering the circumstances I’ve decided that’s just… surprising.

Today’s observation is that there doesn’t appear to be anything resembling a real-life, paper, system map.  There’s a web-based PDF map that you can use to try to find your line; apparently you can even download it so you don’t have to be web-enabled.  This works OK for me, because I can pull it up on a 30-inch cinema screen and zoom to see a decent portion of the city with enough resolution to actually be able to read the line numbers.  But your average bus rider in Houston certainly doesn’t have a top-of-the-line screen and probably doesn’t have regular internet access! Not to mention it’s a 10 MB file, which is fine for high-speed access but again, is this standard equipment in the wards? 

It’s another way the digital divide penalizes the poor – those most likely to need reliable public transportation have to figure out the system in a hit-or-miss way, while those who have the resources to need the system well probably also have a car and a parking pass.

Grumph.

CiaraCat was talking about junk mail that seems to target the vulnerable – an issue that doubly pisses me off, since first I dislike being subjected to advertisement in the first place, and second I am offended by ads that try to get a sale by misrepresentation of any sort.

So one response that gets bandied about is to mail them back their own postage-paid envelopes, which gives them the cost of paying for delivery and paying someone to open the envelope.  Stuffing the envelope with something (shredded mail, old kleenex, etc) just makes the point more strongly.

When there’s no postage-paid envelope, what do you do?

At work, I’ve been playing around with some open-source, free software that effectively works as a PBX – allows you to set up automated phone calls at pre-determined times, to a list of phone numbers.

Would be (vaguely) entertaining to set up such a system on an unused line somewhere and use it to lash back at companies that use unsavory advertising techniques.  Could record a message about how upset you were to receive un-ethical materials from the company, and then whenever you get an ad you don’t like, put in the contact number and set the program to call with that message every 10 minutes for a few days.

Wonder if that’s illegal?