Tag: Automation

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Talking to a doctor’s office, not the doctor, but just the fucking doctor’s office has become nearly impossible.

In late September, I talked with my primary doctor about a skin problem I was having. He advised me to see a dermatologist and referred me to one. I called the dermatologist for an appointment where I was strongly advised to leave a message and that someone from the doctor’s office would call me back. I get an email that very same day saying that someone would investigate (I am assuming whether they take my insurance and they will pay for it) and get back with me. So far, things are going swimmingly.

But then no return phone call for a week. As I was going out of town, I put it on hold, thinking foolishly, that eventually someone would contact me with an appointment. When I returned to San Diego, still having not received a response from the doctor, I called the office to inquire about my appointment. I talked to a nice woman who apologized profusely about the failed response and booked an appointment for me. Success.

A day or so later, I received a phone call from the nice woman telling me that while they took my insurance this year, they weren’t taking it next year. Since it is now mid-October and the soonest they can get me an appointment for was mid-November, they didn’t want to start seeing me as a patient in cases their services were needed into 2026. All vaguely rational sounding, so I went back to my primary physician.

The assistant at my primary physician’s office, who has always been helpful, couldn’t understand why they just didn’t keep the appointment and, if I needed further treatment, refer me another dermatologist in 2026. She said I had a legitimate concern about a growth on my hand and they could, at least, get the ball rolling.

She told me she would take care of it. A day later she calls me back saying that they don’t want me as a patient and she find another dermatologist to look at my hand. She added it might take a little time because she now has to investigate which doctors will take my insurance in both 2025 and 2026. Towards the end October, she finds one.

I got swept up with other events in my life but was finally able to contact the new dermatologist at the beginning of November. A very unhelpful phone tree took the call. The recorded message kept advising me to use the on-line scheduling system. My experience with on-line scheduling has been horrendous. There is no response to my request or a continual back and forth about a suitable date for the appointment.

I opted to stay on the phone line where every so often I was encourage again to use the on line system or leave a message on the recorder and someone would call me back that very same day. My experience with this is I rarely get a call back and, if I do, it is never on the same day. I chose to stay on the line. Fifteen minutes into my wait, I was disconnected. Or I think I was disconnected. I stopped getting the annoying messages about using the on line system and my phone stopped timing how long the phone was. There was just silence which I deduced was a hang up.

I called again but this time I decided to look at the on line system. I completed the form as best I could knowing that there would be a back and forth about the actual appointment. I sent the form in while waiting because what the Hell, I was on hold any way, it was something to fill the time, I got some lunch and, after a half hour on hold, I surrendered. I would just have to trust that the on line system would work.

Later that day, I received a response from their on line system telling me that they were working on scheduling my appointment and I they would confirm an appointment soon. I don’t like the sounds of soon. Soon. That could be any time frame they choose.

So it is approaching the middle of November and I still do not have a scheduled date for someone to look at the growth on my hand. Think about that. A month and half just trying to get a fucking appointment.

Thank God I don’t live in a country with socialized medicine who knows how long I would be waiting for an appointment.

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Hallelujah. Although this will comes as no surprise to anyone in the corporate world, research shows that too many meetings are bad for both the employee’s state of mind and, because of that, corporate productivity. I particularly like the observation that if someone isn’t given a break from meetings that they take one anyway — it just is in the meeting. So, while the person’s body may be attending the meeting, the person’s mind is elsewhere.

All of this would seem obvious. Schools give children recesses for a reason. It is difficult to focus on a subject for terribly long and, in order to help the child’s retention, there is play break. Children come back from recess more energetic and ready to study. Somehow the work world has bought into the notion that adult human beings are somehow different from children human beings and thus can endure a day filled with meetings. They can not and the science shows this.

Multiple meetings in a work day is a relatively modern concept. When I started working in the1980’s, a day of back-to-back meetings was rare. People worked and the occasional meeting was held. Meetings were so rare that they were often accompanied with donuts or cookies. Sadly, the treats have been ditched and the meetings are innumerable and endless.

I blame computers. Now, I don’t have any proof but the more automated my company became, the more meetings the company seem to call. I am guessing this is because while human beings made mistakes with non-automated processes, the process itself very rarely changed. If mistakes were made, the employee may need retraining but the process stayed the same. With automation, on the other hand, procedures changed on a regular basis because there may be a problem with the automation. This meant that a workaround was needed to to keep the business running. People needed to talk about the workaround because one department could easily implement the change while the workaround would bring another department the brink of disaster. People understandably had to talk.

Automation brought a slew of meetings. People needed to know when the system was down and when it could be brought up. They needed to know that the system was performing certain functions incorrectly and what to do if you experienced it. They needed to know that the system was being updated and what information you needed to give your employees. Meetings and more meetings were the result.

Then teleconference came along and meetings, at least in my mind, went out of control. They became so frequent that some days I found myself in back-to-back meetings for days. I worked for a European company with a huge presence in Asia. I now began to have teleconferences at odd times – say 6AM in my morning. Last minute meetings became the bane of my existence. I could dutifully check my next day schedule for meetings before I left work each day and find a new meeting invitation on my calendar. Someone, while I was sleeping, decided to call a last minute teleconference. And I wasn’t that important of a person. The big wigs, more often than not, are behind closed doors for days on end.

I could live with this if the meetings were really necessary. But most of the time, they weren’t. There were check-ins. How are things going with this project? Fine. Do you have any questions or need my help? No. The meeting was over in 5 minutes which is really annoying after I carted my ass out of bed at 5AM in the morning. Or, worse still, I shouldn’t have been invited in the first place? I have sat through meetings in which I have sat quietly while people talked about something I knew nothing about, waiting patiently for my role to be revealed to discover that there was no reason whatsoever for me to be on this call. I once had someone claim that it was courtesy to keep me in the loop about the project. Why would anyone invite you to a meeting with no expectations that you have anything to contribute? I understood nothing that was said because I knew nothing about the project. If I was asked by anyone what the project was about, I could maybe recall the name and little else.

So, as you can see, I am happy to hear that people have begun to see the productivity issues related to too many meetings. Hopefully someone with power will take this new information seriously and tackle the proliferation of meetings. I am betting there will be a meeting coming to your Outlook calendar soon. Don’t thank me.