I spent 45 minutes today on the other end of this sort of hassle. In my case, I was supposed to schedule a follow-up with a hand surgeon because my kid broke a finger, which was set yesterday in the ER. There was a specific recommended window for that followup, and of course the hand surgeon specialists are all scheduling a month out. (That's well outside the window.) I think there were two fundamental problems in my case:
1. Regions Hospital gave me the standard number for my network's appointment center, rather than the number for the specialty center appointments desk. 2. When I called that number, I got an appointment center novice.
After lots of people treating me impatiently for saying that if one week was the recommended time window for the followup, two full weeks was not okay with me, I finally got passed to someone who was like, "June 15th? okay, how does 1:30 p.m. work for you?" and DONE.
There were several points where I was absolutely certain that the main problem was that I had been passed to the wrong person, and yet I had absolutely no idea what magic phrase would get me passed to the correct person. It was maddening. If anyone had asked me what number I'd called, I would have read off the number, no problem. Instead, they kept asking me whether my daughter had ever seen a plastic surgeon in this network before because for reasons that utterly mystify me, hand surgeons of the sort she would be seeing for this followup are classified as plastic surgeons. (I did answer the question, while also wondering if the reason I was getting this runaround is that we had gotten mis-classified somewhere en route.)
So frustrating. I promise I didn't take it out on any random phone-answering people, though.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2015-06-06 04:04 am (UTC)I spent 45 minutes today on the other end of this sort of hassle. In my case, I was supposed to schedule a follow-up with a hand surgeon because my kid broke a finger, which was set yesterday in the ER. There was a specific recommended window for that followup, and of course the hand surgeon specialists are all scheduling a month out. (That's well outside the window.) I think there were two fundamental problems in my case:
1. Regions Hospital gave me the standard number for my network's appointment center, rather than the number for the specialty center appointments desk.
2. When I called that number, I got an appointment center novice.
After lots of people treating me impatiently for saying that if one week was the recommended time window for the followup, two full weeks was not okay with me, I finally got passed to someone who was like, "June 15th? okay, how does 1:30 p.m. work for you?" and DONE.
There were several points where I was absolutely certain that the main problem was that I had been passed to the wrong person, and yet I had absolutely no idea what magic phrase would get me passed to the correct person. It was maddening. If anyone had asked me what number I'd called, I would have read off the number, no problem. Instead, they kept asking me whether my daughter had ever seen a plastic surgeon in this network before because for reasons that utterly mystify me, hand surgeons of the sort she would be seeing for this followup are classified as plastic surgeons. (I did answer the question, while also wondering if the reason I was getting this runaround is that we had gotten mis-classified somewhere en route.)
So frustrating. I promise I didn't take it out on any random phone-answering people, though.