I've mentioned this in past blogs, but one large difference between myself and my dad is our expectations for customer service. Perhaps it's a generational thing, or perhaps it stems from my relatively recent immersion in a service sector job at the stadium here in San Diego, but I have absolutely no expectations of decent service at all. I know how disaffected and dumb and bored service workers are, and if my order comes up remotely like what I wanted and it's still sort of hot and there aren't any obvious traces of spittle in it, I'm satisfied. Dad, on the other hand, actually expects people to do a good job, and even worse, to care.
So on his second day in the hospital, when he was at last able to take solid food and wanted to discontinue the liquid diet he'd been stuck on, he talked to the nurse around 11am, and said he'd like a solid lunch and some sort of soup. She said she'd get on it and wandered back to the nurses' station. Five minutes later dad wanted some more ice chips to suck/crunch on, and sent me down to get them. When I arrived the nurse we'd talked to earlier was just leaving in a coat, and when I asked what kind of soup they'd had available (dad wanted something light; vegetable or chicken, rather than cream or beef) she had completely forgotten about ordering his lunch and was on her way to get her own. To her credit she stopped and called down to the kitchen and put in his order before going to get her own food, and I was there for another hour or so before heading off to get my own lunch and to do some yard work at dad's house.
When I returned in the evening, around 6, dad was eating and looking exasperated. His food had just arrived, he said, 6+ hours after it had been ordered, and of course they sent him some sort of beef stock soup. It had been a huge ordeal too, with the kitchen calling up to his room saying he was still in the computer on a liquid diet, not a solid one, and the nurse insisting he wanted solid with soup, and dad even got on the phone at some point and told them what he wanted. That happened around 1pm, and then there were more calls around 2:30pm, and then he finally got "lunch" at nearly 5:30. My mom (dad's ex) was even there some during the afternoon, and during the interminable wait for soup she said she'd just go down to the cafeteria and buy some... and of course the cafeteria had closed 20 minutes before she got there.) On top of that, moments after he finished eating his late soup, it another nurse came in with a dinner platter, with chicken and some sort of creamy pasta. Food he had no room for and didn't want anyway.
I mention this all because of our reactions to it. That's exactly the sort of thing I expect from hospital food, or really from any place where you don't actually see them make the food right in front of you. You'll wait, they'll screw up your order, and the person who brings it to you will have had nothing to do with the actual preparation of the food, and will be no one you can productively complain to. Dad complains anyway, while trying to be nice about it, out of some misguided impressing that anyone actually gives a damn.
They don't. They really couldn't care less. Trust me; I worked at the stadium for ten years and I never once saw a single employee there actually give a fuck about anything any customer complained about. Complaints were dealt with purely on a "Will I get fired for this?" basis, or a "how much of my time will dealing with this take. basis. I fell into the later category,
most of the time, since I was selling poison, on commission, with a very limited time frame to sell it in. Baseball and football games only last so long, after all, and people mostly stop buying grossly-overpriced sweets towards the last quarter of the event. So while I didn't really care if their $3.50 spoonful of ice cream was the right flavor or temperature, any time I spent standing there talking to them about it was costing me sales and money. It was quicker for me to simply give them a new one and then browbeat my stand manager into refunding me for the bad one than it was to argue with the customer in the first place.
I should also mention how frivilous most of the customer complaints were. I was understanding when people got a bug in their cotton candy (a not uncommon experience, given how sticky the stuff is and how many bugs flew around the stadium and the cotton candy spinning area) or when their ice cream was completely melted or something like that. But when they bought a water from a guy walking around in the hot sun, and it wasn't quite ice cold, or when they wanted a blue cotton candy and we only had pink left, I was much more of the "Whatever." reaction.
And those were people with
real complaints; I couldn't even tell you how many dozens of times someone came up to me with about one bite/sip left of their pizza/cotton candy/ice cream/beer/etc and said that it wasn't any good and that they wanted their money back. The obvious, "Well, you seem to have been able to force 95% of it down your pie hole." comment was always a temptation. Particularly rude/drunk guys usually tried the pizza one, and if I were really in a hurry I'd just say, "No. You ate it already." and run off. By the time their beer-slowed brain processed my comment I'd be long gone, and walking down to the pizza stand was way too much work for them to bother with. I was occasionally tempted to require them to return the pizza, ideally into the nearest trash can, but that probably wouldn't have gone over very well either.
Background check aside, the typical customer service continued the next day, when dad was being discharged. He needed a medical chair thingie, one that he could sit down on in a half-crouch with sturdy arm rests, and in the morning the hospital said they'd get him one before he left that afternoon. Lunchtime came and no chair, and then when he was being discharged and ferried home around 3pm they said they'd have it delivered and promised it would be there by 7pm. I wasn't actually there to hear this proclamation, but if I had been I would have laughed out loud. "Of course it will be delivered at 7pm on a Friday night." I thought when I heard it, and figured dad would be lucky to get it by Monday, by which time he probably wouldn't even need it anymore.
Mom and the stepdad came over for dinner Friday, and we all had pizza and salad out on the back patio and enjoyed ourselves. When they were leaving, after watching most of
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow on dad's glorious HD TV, dad asked me to turn on the font light and see if there was a card or failed delivery notice or something like that, from the medical supply. I managed not to laugh aloud, and even went and looked to humor him.
It arrived Saturday around noon, and seems to be fine. But of course dad's got to mention how they promised him it would be here Friday evening, and this gets the delivery guy defensive and he starts digging out invoices showing that he only picked it up this morning, etc. Meanwhile I'm standing there praying to my non-existent god that it would end soon so I could carry the thing into his bedroom and take off the plastic wrap and get it operational. The delivery guy doesn't care, he had nothing to do with the time frame, the hospital delayed, etc. And even if he did, what good will it do to complain? He'll just be annoyed and go even slower the rest of the day to get even, and he hates his shitty job anyway. You might as well complain about the smell to a manure salesman.
The customer service idiocy was capped off Friday evening, when dad rode home from the hospital with a friend while I was dispatched to the CostCo pharmacy to get his pain killer prescription filled. The hospital didn't call it over; they just gave us a piece of paper with the doctor's writing on it, which was the first mistake. I handed in the card when I got there and they told me it would be a 45-60 minute wait. If it had been called in it would have been ready when I got there.
The real fun began 45-60 minutes later, when I returned and waited in line to pick up the pills, only to be told that they couldn't fill the prescription since the "date" slot on the prescription card hadn't been filled in. So they'd faxed the document over ot the hospital and were waiting for it to come back completed. Now realize that the prescription had been written maybe 2 hours earlier, and that anyone at all could have just written in 6/3/05 in one second, and all would have been well. I said, "Give it here and I'll put in the date." but of course that's not allowed. Procedures must be followed. I suppose they have rules about that sort of thing, but think of the logic there; say I'm some junkie faking my way to a prescription for this non-narcotic, non-additive pain killer that's costing me a whole $1.69 with my dad's medical plan... how likely am I to screw up the form and leave the date blank, when I know that's required? It's obviously a mistake that's only going to be made by an honest customer who never even looked at the form, and given that the pills didn't even cost two bucks... why bother with faxing and the hospital and all of that?
They did though, since thinking is hard, and dad had to wait until Saturday morning for me to drive over and get his pills.
The gist of all this is that I think it's quaint that dad actually expects better, and it's interesting that I get annoyed by it when it's obviously stupid, but not when it's just incompetent. I guess I expect people behind the scenes to be slow and stupid, but hope that when given a very simple choice or task, like writing in the date on a prescription to enable it to be filled promptly, I feel they should pass the idiot test. I'm as naive and wishful in that way as dad is about other things, I guess.
Overall, is it worse that he still expects decent service, or that I no longer do? Do you prefer cynicism or optimism?
