My friend Kim and her husband welcomed a new person to this world! No more details from me, you creepy internet stalkers, but congratulations to them! It’s funny how long I’ve known Kim now. I met her when I started taking MCAT prep classes at Kaplan downtown. That was 11 or 12 years ago. I kicked ass on the MCAT, but screwed up enough of the rest of my medical school applications to avoid being admitted.

It’s probably just as well that I didn’t get into medical school. There are so many levels of bureaucratic nonsense in the typical doctor’s office that I’d probably go nuts. For example, my mom’s eye appointment was really screwed up by the office procedures. I called on Tuesday and by some lucky coincidence I got her an appointment for Thursday. I told them I’d have her primary care physician write a referral by the time of the appointment. They’ve never had any problems with that and they told me that if it wasn’t there when my mom got to her appointment, they’d just have her sign a form saying she might have to pay the whole bill.

Today, Wednesday, a receptionist called my mom and cancelled the appointment because there was no referral. She had no idea that I’d just made the appointment yesterday. I called around, and had the referral to the ophthalmologist’s FAX machine an hour after the cancellation phone call, about 11AM, around 24 hours from the time I made the appointment. I had to reschedule the cancelled appointment with the dingbat receptionist.

I told the dingbat that this was all unacceptable, changing the rules day-by-day. Yesterday they were willing to give my mom some slack for the paperwork, but today they wanted my mom to bring in cash if the paperwork wasn’t complete to their approval. I told the dingbat I wanted to complain to the office manager about their broken processes. Guess what? The office manager is out of the office this week and has no voice mail. I said that was ridiculous, and she countered that the office manager had a family emergency. I replied that I didn’t care if the office manager was dead, they should still have voice mail for someone who was responsible for running this circus.

Now if I was a doctor I think I would have throttled a couple of people today. Oh, and my mom’s primary care physician has a broken phone system. You listen to all the options and no matter what you hit you get put in a hold queue for five minutes with awful music and advertisements. Then the receptionist transfers you to someone who wasn’t busy the whole time and could have just answered the phone if you had their number. It’s truly a joy.

I think that if I ever needed to raise my blood pressure, I’d just call a doctor’s office and ask for something they weren’t expecting. I’m sure they’d just screw me around until I had a proper headache.