We have the name of a supervisor who was pretty helpful last night, so I will call her later, when I'm not actually at work and have time to spend on this bullshit.

Thank god I had some refills left at a local pharmacy.

"I guess those are your only options!"

And then you reached through the phone and punched her in the face?

(Uh, you guys called me, so maybe it would be good if someone knew the details before I called back?)

Unless you were given a specific agent to call back to, the person probably had never seen your case before you gave them the reference number. Or they may have half a dozen cases to deal with.

edit: sorry, knee jerk defense of the poor sods working in call centers. We know the people calling in don't want to talk to us, but we can only work with the information we have.

I'm sorry so many of us are having no-good, terrible days.

Theo, I'm so sorry about Muppet, and I'm glad you were there for her.

Steph, oh man. My heartfelt sympathies. That's my constant fear with Lucky. These are the kinds of surprises we should never have to deal with. Much love to you and Tim.

Our Buffista pets are lucky to have such awesome humans.

The systems are still annoying, though. When I called my health plan, I had to put my member number and birthdate into the automatic system, and then tell the person who answered all the same information -- I did not get the impression that I was confirming my identity, but that they were looking me up for the first time.

I always try very hard to be polite to people in call centers, because I know they don't make the policies that make my life hell. But when something like this happens, and I'm so angry that I'm shaking when I get off the phone, I feel okay about sharing my personal thoughts on the board.

Oh, yeah, of course! That's so fucked up.

It makes me madder that it's systemically fucked up. On person making a mistake I can forgive; stacking the deck so there is no way for one person to fix the mess is just egregious.

I will say, when I finally got through on that annoying call system, the person on the other end was very sympathetic! She couldn't do anything for me -- it was about that bill I was surprised to get, and it was correct -- but she was very sympathetic about the whole thing.

That was actually part of our training back when I was a customer service rep, listening sympathetically. Because sometimes that's all you can do and sometimes that's all the customer really wants you to do. I've found it useful to keep in mind in a variety of situations.

That is why I try to do my support by chat. If I get enraged, they can't hear me and I have a minute to think about my response. Otherwise, I break out the "Do you mean to tell me...."? and get kind of mean.

Speaking of enraged- it my continuing saga of Outlook, the Dean's Executive Assistant just sent an email saying that she checked outlook calendar for the availability of two times. She wanted everyone (or their assistants) to confirm their availability before sending out a meeting request! That is more steps than needed for this. WHY WHY WHY!!!!

My boss was like "could you just send out an outlook request????"