Everybody’s lost it, Part I

My beloved veterinarian’s office apparently moved to a new office location without informing customers. They also changed phone systems. The new phone system doesn’t work, and they didn’t leave a forwarding message on the old phone system. You call, leave a message, never hear back, and never learn what’s become of the business.

Our oldest cat, Snow White, who’s had failing kidneys for two years, is alive at 18 chiefly because we love her and we give her drip medication three times a week. We ran out of the medication last week and requested a refill, but never heard back, and nobody was at the office when we checked.

So for a week I’ve been calling them every morning and every afternoon, while also using their website (which, like the voicemail system, offered not a peep about their office relocation) to request the medicine our queen requires to keep living, and nobody called me back or responded to web messages or text messages, because they weren’t hearing or seeing them.

Today I received a boilerplate email saying that they had moved; the hurried communication included the *area* they moved to but not a street address.

The email also said that their new phone system doesn’t work. So they’ve been sitting in a new office with no customers, not getting their messages—not having thought to provide advance notice to their customers that any changes were afoot—and probably wondering what went wrong.

The email included a phone number we could use to send them a text message. So I did that, letting them know I’d been trying to reach them all week, repeating my request for the badly needed medication, and asking for the street address they’ve moved to.

Three times they texted back with the same information they’d already provided. Information that told the general area they’d moved to. With no street address.

I continued to respond, saying that’s nice but what’s the street address? And each time they replied by resending the same boilerplate that contains absolutely no street address information. You’d think, oh, he’s talking to a bot. But in fact I’m talking to people. People who are responding to messages they’re too frantic to actually read and reply to properly. Instead of answering once, correctly, they end up answering many times without actually, you know, answering.

I empathize with their freakout, I know their job is hard. I had service jobs myself all through my twenties—the benefit of an MFA in fiction writing is that it prepares you to take shit jobs that will later give you material to write about. And even much later in life, as a business owner, I’ve been guilty myself of responding too fast to queries I scanned instead of reading. But I learned better. I learned that it was actually more helpful to read and respond correctly to ten messages, than to scan and respond uselessly to 100. 

I know this because one of my former employees would yell at me to slow down. As you may realize, nobody who worked for me ever feared me. Nor did I want them to. I’m happy about that. No boss should intimidate the people who work for them. I made lots of business mistakes—the cliche about creatives not being super-duper at business exists for a reason, and was true for me. But I never made the mistake of encouraging my employees to live in fear. And neither, apparently, does my veterinarian. Which is cool. He is, after all, a good person. The panic driving the thoughtless responses doesn’t come from him, but from the situation.

I’m not angry at anyone—not the brilliant veterinarian who founded the business, not his medical colleagues, and certainly not the folks who run the front desk. But damn. Don’t move without informing your customers. Don’t tell people approximately where you’ve moved to when you finally realize your customers have no idea what happened to your office and you should let them know where you’ve been hiding all week. And if a customer with fair-to-excellent diplomatic skills gently points out that they still need a street address, the thing to do is update your boilerplate to include the street address—not keep resending the useless boilerplate that asks people to treat their pets’ health as a scavenger hunt with exciting clues about where the veterinarian MIGHT be located.

I am an employee myself these days, and happy to be one. I like that everyone at my workplace is available for honest conversation—even the CEO. It’s an unusual and excellent part of our culture.

Dealing with bills and medications and doctors is something I squeeze into short breaks I take during my working day. Today I’m not only dealing with this during those breaks, I’m also trying to coax the staff of a brilliant and expensive gum surgeon I see (I’m old, I have health problems like everybody, and more than some) to send me the records of my many expensive visits there, which I have paid up front (as they required), so I can share those records with my insurance company and possibly get reimbursed. I spent ten days waiting for those records after they promised to send them to me right away. It used to be, doctors sent their bills to the insurer, and if there was any part the insurance company didn’t cover, they’d invoice you later, discreetly. But that hasn’t been The Way of medical treatment in NYC for years, now. I was polite and didn’t bother them about the missing documentation. I only asked twice. I finally got it and submitted it to the insurer. The insurer’s website entered a black hole after I submitted the invoice, because of course it did. So I submitted again. After which, there were two identical invoices in the queue, because of course there were.

So they’ll probably reject them both. As an added bonus, I discovered that the periodontist had sent me two (out of seven) of the bills that they then re-included in the new mega-bill. Which means the insurance company will think I’m fraudulently trying to double-bill them for my expenses. Because of course they will.

Solving writing problems, design problems, and music production problems brings me joy. Dealing with life on life’s terms, not always so much.

The world is on fire and we will see worse before some sense of justice or even normality returns—if it ever does. But me, I’m still worrying about medical bills and where on earth my cat’s lifesaving medical practice has moved to.

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