Silver Spoon

Today was one of those days when I wished I could just crawl back into bed and sleep away the day, hoping for a better tomorrow. From the moment I walked in the door at work until I walked back out it was hell. Crappy patients, crappy policies, crappy attitudes. I have such a low tolerance level for stupidity these days. Just once I want to be able to look a patient in the eye and tell him/her exactly what I think. The same goes for my employees, who seem to think that they can come to work and spend the day on the computer or their cell phones with no consequence. Don't even get me started about the service excellence team who thinks that we should be able to smile our way through the day while doing the juggling act of getting everything done in a timely manner. God forbid if someone complains that they weren't treated like a princess or they had to wait , gasp, forty-five minutes to see a doctor. "OMG! I know Mr. Bigwig so-and-so and you must kiss my f...ing ass or I will go whining like a bratty teenager and then you will be sorry and I don't care that that patient you took ahead of me was having a heart attack. I am more important. See my silver spoon stuck up my ass?" As I forced myself to be pleasant I was fighting the urge to just get up and walk out and not look back. I worked in the ghetto for seventeen years and I dealt with so much crap in that job but in retrospect I have found that I would much rather be working down there in the trenches. Where the patients at least appreciated the fact that the doctors and staff were willing to provide care to them no matter how long they had to wait to be seen, in a neighborhood where the druggies and alcoholics, the criminals and the insane were wandering the streets. I am not and have never been a kiss-ass kind of person. That is not to say that I don't understand the importance of good customer service. It's just that sometimes the customer is not always right. I now work in an affluent area of the city and it is far worse than the ghetto. By stroking egos and bribing our way out of customer dissatisfaction with freebies and gift cards, false apologies and compliments, we have created an environment where we are sure to fail in our efforts to please everyone. What these people really need is to be told to shut up, sit down, wait their turn like everyone else, and to quit acting like spoiled brats. Money sure doesn't buy them manners. At least when I left the office this evening I was able to reconcile some of the bad behavior of these patients today because hanging low in the dark night sky was a giant yellow full moon. The crazies were out in full force! They were just better dressed than the crazies in the ghetto.