News from the Great Beyond

A bit belated...

... but in case you were waiting for it, here for your reminiscing and/or viewing pleasure is the 2010 collection of Your Daily Dose of YouTube Holiday Cheer!

December 1: For my long-term blog and FB friends, you know what December means... newer friends, time to experience it! It's time for Your Daily Dose of YouTube Holiday Cheer! December 1 is the first day of Hanukkah, so I thought I'd share something a little... different. You don't often find someone playing one of these:

December 2: Your Daily Dose of YouTube Holiday Cheer for December 2nd - because Celtic Woman is just amazing with Christmas carols :)

December 3:  And now for something completely different.... Your Daily Dose of YouTube Holiday Cheer for December 3:  Pomplamoose.  Aww yeah.

December 4: Your Daily Dose of YouTube Holiday Cheer today, courtesy of Cherry Caid... Simply lovely.

December 5: Your Daily Dose of YouTube Holiday Cheer - two-for-one special! :)

December 6: Your ultra-cool Daily Dose of YouTube Holiday Cheer....  In the holiday mood yet?

December 7: I think I'm having flashbacks... Your Daily Dose of YouTube Holiday Cheer for December 7, boy-band style:

December 8: Your Daily Dose of YouTube Holiday Cheer today... Impressive fiddlin' from a talented family.

December 9: Your Daily Dose of YouTube Holiday Cheer for December 9:  pretty and slightly quirky... this could describe the video, the song, or many other things for that matter.

December 10: Your Daily Dose of Socially Conscious YouTube Holiday Cheer, courtesy of U2.

 

Sung to the tune of "What Have I Done to Deserve This"

Subtitled "I don't know who peed in your Cheerios this morning, lady, but it wasn't me"...

Today's Customer Service Nightmare brought to you by the Pet Shop Boys - goooo 80's flashback!

Now that this is firmly implanted in your brain, let me tell you about ANGRY WOMAN, who spoke to me this afternoon for a mercifully brief, albeit excruciating, time.

In the course of a phone call to place a refill order, I am required to ask an average of 10-12 questions. Some of them, if the customer has played nice with the phone system, I am able to skip.  Some questions are a result of the way I choose to go about placing an order, but most are required for verification purposes, either to comply with HIPAA privacy laws, or for our own procedures to make sure we've got the correct address, phone number, and credit card info for our customers.

ANGRY WOMAN did not want to answer questions.  ANGRY WOMAN wanted me to do things in her way, in her time frame, and was already apparently in a snit when I answered her call.

First question:  "Can I have your name please?"  Normally this elicits the customer's first and last name - other reps phrase it as "Can I have your first and last name please?", which I suppose could cut down on the additional questions later... but then, when I have someone calling from another department within the company, or from a pharmacy or a doctor's office, I don't always need their full name.    ANGRY WOMAN gave me her first name, and then very curtly stated she wanted a refill order.  I could already tell that she was going to be difficult.

Second question:  "Can I have your ID number please?"   ANGRY WOMAN rattled off the 9 digit ID so quickly I was barely able to follow it - thankfully, I managed to get it right the first time so as to save myself from being berated at this point.  That came later.

Third and fourth questions: "And your last name and date of birth, please?"  These are things I have to verify for privacy purposes.  Most people are understanding about this.  ANGRY WOMAN does not care about HIPAA and her internal pressure is clearly building.

The Customer is Always Right...

... even when he's clearly lying through his teeth.

Ahh, customer service... the job where on a daily basis you walk a fine line between doing your stated job purpose (serving the customer) and acting in the best interest of your employer.

My final call of the day today was from a gentleman who was very confident in his rightness as the consumer, very matter of fact, and very infuriating in his conviction that I could do nothing to change the outcome that he was aiming for.

At the outset of the call he made it clear that he was in the car on his cell phone - he travels "all the time" - and he was "far too busy" to deal with these petty matters like following up on orders he placed and never paid for.    He was looking at a statement we'd sent him for a past due balance.  He informed me that he never received the order in question.  I pulled up his order history and was immediately dumbstruck.

The order (for diabetic test strips) was placed on May 27th.  This was his first, and only, order with us.  The code on the order in our system indicated that it was originated by a call to us asking us to contact his doctor's office for his prescription.  The order was shipped on June 2nd by first class mail.  The amount due on the order was $130.00.  And the customer insisted that he never received the order.

Since the order was from almost 5 months ago, I expected there would have been a history of at least a handful of phone calls logged from him asking about order status, or responding to previously mailed statements (which would have been sent once per month since the order was shipped).

Nope.  This man called us once on May 27th, and has not bothered to contact us again until today, when he decided to deal with the letter we sent him threatening to send him to collections for the past due balance on his account.

Musings.... On Writing

A couple of weeks ago I woke up sometime before my alarm went off, in the dark with very little sense of what time it was but a sense of urgency clinging to what remained of a dream.  As I tried to drift back to sleep, a single line popped into my head, as if my subconscious was writing a story in my sleep, and it stuck with me.  I posted it on my Facebook wall when I got home that evening, so I wouldn't allow myself to forget it for future use.

"At the end, I was left with just this: Elizabeth dead, and myself out of time to mourn her."

That was all I had, but posting it on Facebook cemented my intention to turn it into something more, especially with comments from friends and family.  Mom asked me about it a few days ago, and I told her I was still mulling it over in my head.  I was slightly afraid that "mulling it over" would be as far as I would ever get, to be honest.

Yesterday I was even thinking about writing this post with a different focus - talking about the difficulty for someone as indecisive as I can be to take just a nugget of a thought and flesh it out into a full story.  

Take my sentence there, for example.  It contained the germ of a story, to be sure, but so many decisions to be made about what it meant.  Obviously it is being told in the first person viewpoint, so one has to determine who "I" am:  male or female?  I have doubts about my ability to write a convincing story from a male viewpoint... but for a while there the story seemed it may demand a male point of view.  Older than the author, or younger? 

And who is Elizabeth to the storyteller?  Wife?  Lover?  Sister?  Mother?  Daughter?  Best friend?  Colleague?  

How did she die?  Car accident? Cancer? Shot by an outlaw of some sort? Peacefully in her sleep at the age of eighty-something?

Even with all those decisions made, arbitrarily, I was going to have to come up with a reason why the storyteller would be out of time to mourn her, and those options seemed to lead me into the realm of a plot that would challenge my ability to write believably.

The results of all these decisions would have a huge impact on what kind of story it would wind up being... I mean, consider the difference between these:  An elderly man on his deathbed recalling his memories and regrets while mourning the passing of his wife of 60 years....  And a secret agent who had (perhaps unwisely) become very close to his or her informant before she was murdered by government assassins and is now running for his or her life.  Both of those stories could contain the line I came up with in my sleep, to very different effect indeed.

And then, while I was coming up with potential examples of the different stories these decisions could lead to, the perfect solution hit me.

You are your own worst enemy.

Hubby-head and I used to be fans of what's known as the Darwin Awards, commemorating people who contribute to Darwin's theory of natural selection by removing themselves from the gene pool in a particularly stupid way.

I'm beginning to think that there needs to be a similar type of award for people who create their own customer service nightmare.

I won't deny that there are boneheaded moves and legitimate errors made on the part of my company's employees now and then - we're all human, and MOP#1 (we're #1, yay!) is not immune from human error, or even computer glitches.   Often when people call in with a particularly sticky problem it is our fault, as they dearly love to point out.  And I've already talked about the fun that can result when one's doctor makes an error...  But sometimes, people, you really can't blame us.  

This past week, my candidate for the title of Customer Service Enemy #1 was a gentleman who apparently has never heard what happens when you assume.

Are you serious, lady?

I'm getting myself adjusted to my actual work schedule here at MOP#1 (we're #1, yay!), so I haven't had a lot to say in the last week or two...  I'm working four 10 hour days - Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 6 AM to 4:30 PM and Saturday from 9 AM to 7:30 PM.  Yes, that's 6 AM.  As in, in the morning.   As in, the bane of my existence. 

And yes, as I confirmed to my boss the other day, I did pick this work schedule.  I like 4-10s, and I couldn't work on Sundays, so this was my best alternative over the Sunday-Weds late shift and the Monday-Friday with rotating Saturdays. 

Having worked it for 3 weeks, I have to say the Monday-Friday shift isn't bad.  I'd probably actually pick that shift if I had to pick all over again, because it gave me time to work out every day before work, as opposed to stumbling out of bed at 4:45 AM and rushing to get ready, pack a lunch, and leave the house by 5:30 at the latest to be at my desk and ready to talk on the phone at 6.

But, as Adam Again used to sing, "It is what it is (what it is)".  (That's a great song, btw.  Watch that video.)  And for better or worse, I'm getting adjusted to early mornings, albeit reluctantly.  This is why I'm writing a blog post before 6 AM on a Saturday, and why I tend to be utterly exhausted and ready to go to bed around 9 PM most nights.  On off days, I find myself staying up until 10.  Whee.   For an avowed night person, you must understand how much I hate this.  Normally I'd be feeling rather alive and alert in the evening hours, and it thoroughly sucks to be yawning at 8:00.  Just sayin'.

In any event, there haven't been a lot of customer stories that stuck with me enough to compel me to write lately, at least until the last couple of days.  Today's stories involve Ms. I'mNotCrazy and Ms. VeryInformedConsumer.

MY doctor would NEVER do THAT!

My family's not big on doctor visits - once I got past the mystifying illnesses of my younger childhood, I can't recall my mom even dragging me to a yearly checkup.  Unless we're actually feeling poorly for an extended period of time, or in severe pain, mostly we just take advantage of home remedies, common sense and prayer, and wait and see if it goes away.

I've certainly been healthy enough to avoid taking anything we in the mail order pharmacy business refer to as "maintenance medications".  The only time in my teenage or adult life I have been taking any prescription medication longer than a few days or weeks was the first two years I was married, when we decided on hormonal birth control pills as our solution to giving ourselves some time to get adjusted to married life and recover from the financial impact of the post-9/11 job situation.  Come to think of it, at the time I believe I got those through mail order, 3 months at a time.

So I haven't had a lot of personal experience with doctors and ongoing prescriptions and the like.  I've only been on the phones at MOP#1 (we're #1, yay!) for a month now, and already I'm accumulating baffling stories of doctor-patient interaction.  I'm sure the customer service reps who have been doing this job for a year or more could come up with some real doozies.

I'm sorry, can you spell that for me?

Back in the *mumbled decade*, when I was a youngun', I recall sitting in Sunday School and in Bible class in the various Christian schools I attended, and being forced to read aloud from the Bible.

The New Testament wasn't quite so bad for reading purposes, but when it came to reading the Old Testament aloud, just nearly every verse in some books contained a name or a place that required a feat of presumptive elocution (also known as a wild guess).  

Some names were long but eventually we heard them repeated enough to pronounce them comfortably:  Nebuchadnezzar... Melchizedek... Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego... But others would hang on the tongue like a fifty pound weight, causing much stammering and starting over, until most of the time we'd either brace ourselves to look stupid and hazard a guess or just give up and move on.

This childhood training is serving me well in my job these days.

A Day in the Life

Due to the wild popularity (snerk) of my 2004 "day in the life" account, I thought it may be interesting to relate what an average day looks like for me right now.   At least, I'll find it interesting.  Perhaps a few of you will be amused or entertained.

4:30 AM:  First alarm goes off.  I reach over to the nightstand and stab the "OK" button on my phone to acknowledge and shut up the obnoxious beeping.  Get up and go to the restroom.  Having not gained full consciousness, I fall back onto the bed and immediately drift off again.

4:50 AM: Second alarm goes off.  Explain to the cell phone alarm just how displeased I am with the fact that I have to wake up when it's still dark.  Sit up in bed and begin stretches.  Stumble around the bedroom in the dark and locate my athletic shoes with socks stuck inside them (easier to do it that way than dig around for socks in the blackness of pre-5 AM with my non-morning-person hazy brain function).  Sit on the bed and put on socks and shoes while continuing to stretch.  Track down location of sports bra and put that on as well.  Whine some more.  Brush teeth, because I cannot stand to leave the house with that morning breath taste in my mouth.

5:05 AM: Grab car keys, phone, purse, and the book du jour (today it was Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood) and get in the car to drive to the gym.  Back out of the garage and hit the garage door remote, which refuses to close the door.  Sigh heavily.  Get out of the car, walk into the garage and punch the wall control for the garage door.  Go into the house through the garage and back out the front door.  Get back in the car and sigh again.

5:07 AM:  Arrive at the intersection of my side street and the major east/west thoroughfare.  Flash high beams at the stoplight to try to trigger it to change.  Pull forward into the crosswalk.  Inch further forward, flashing high beams.  Finally trigger the stupid light change when my front tires are resting on the line at the far side of the crosswalk.

5:12 AM:  Pull up to the gym, a mile from my house. Sigh heavily.  Yawn.  Grab book and purse from the passenger seat, and pop the trunk before locking the car.  Dump purse in trunk.  Go back to car and get the towel from the front seat.  Claim a treadmill and set up the manual program for 20 minutes at a speed and incline that will give me a good heart rate for cardio (the computerized program insists it be able to measure my heart rate by keeping both hands on sensors, which makes it impossible to hold my book... plus it likes to reduce my speed and increase my incline which throws me off my rhythm).  Begin reading the book du jour.  Discover an impending pain in the left calf after 11 minutes and hit the "cooldown" button.  After cooldown, switch to the recumbent bike for 12 minutes.  Use towel to wipe off equipment and dripping forehead.  Return home.

5:50 AM: Park in front of the condo instead of fighting with the garage door opener again.  Round up clothing for the day.  Put athletic shoes with socks stuffed inside for tomorrow back against the closet door to be found in the dark.  Take shower and get ready for work.  Slip cranberry supplements and chromium picolinate in pocket to take with breakfast.  Double check to make sure I opened the chromium bottle and not the melatonin.  Falling asleep at work, not so handy.

6:25 AM:  Leave for work.  Have battle of wills with the stoplight at the intersection near my house again.  Sigh heavily.

Mr. Grumpypants and Other Fascinating Customers

So returns the "Work (ACK!)" category - for those who haven't been following my adventures on Facebook, back in mid-May I was interviewed and accepted for a temp-to-hire position at a local call center for a national mail order pharmacy. 

In keeping with my formerly stated anonymity principles, henceforth we shall refer to my prospective employer as MailOrderPharmacy#1 (we're #1 - yay!), or MOP#1 to save typing all that out.  Technically I'm still an official employee of the temp agency, but the supervisors at MOP#1 have stated their intention is to hire permanently everyone who makes it through the 90 day temp period and looks like they're getting the hang of it.

So far I'm pretty confident I'm getting the hang of it.  My job entails taking incoming phone calls of all sorts for the mail order prescription business - new prescription orders (we can take the information from the patient and fax their doctor to get an official prescription record in the files), refills of existing prescriptions, checking order status, taking payments on account balances, providing price quotes, explaining how this whole mail-order thing works anyway, and setting up new accounts.  I and my comrades are the first point of contact for customers who want their medication mailed to them, have received medication and don't know what it is, or haven't received it yet and are frantic to figure out what happened to it.