Wait lists affect more than medical care
I hate voice mail with a passion I normally reserve for gangrenous wounds.
I know why — it\’s that sense of utter helplessness. I\’m on hold, while automated responses assure me that I\’m being taken care of.
Voice mail is almost certainly more efficient than dictating my name and telephone number to a small child who will dutifully scribble the message on the countertop in crayon and then forget about it.
Next week, or whenever his mother scrubs the counter clean, she\’ll ask, “What\’s this? It looks like a telephone number.”
And he\’ll say, “I dunno.”
But I still prefer human contact to the chain of robotic instructions:
- For service in English, press 1…
- To query an item on your account, press 2…
- Please enter your sixteen-digit account number…
- For your current debit balance, press 1. For your most recent billing, press 2…
- To speak to a live service representative, press 7…
- All service representatives are currently busy dealing with more important customers. If you wish to take the chance of leaving a message, press 4…
The customer comes second
Voice mail was invented, I suspect, by some sadist who wanted to ensure that none of the lower-paid staff should ever have free time to drink coffee, paint nails, or exchange gossip. There would be just enough personnel on hand to answer an average flow of incoming calls, spread out over the day.
Which may work for the business\’s bottom line. But it doesn\’t work for me. Because I am not a statistic, an average, a single digit waiting to be processed. At that moment, I am my only call.
A friend\’s father lost his sight in an operation considered 99 per cent successful. He was just one per cent. But for him, it was 100 per cent blindness.
Having to leave a message on voice mail tells me that I don\’t matter enough for immediate attention. They\’ll deal with me when they get around to it. IF they get around to it.
Our three-year-old granddaughter needed a prescription filled for bronchitis. The pharmacist found something wrong in the doctor\’s instructions — the dosage was either for an older child, or for a similar medication.
When our daughter finally got through to the doctor\’s office, four hours and repeated voice mails later, she was told, “We\’ll try to get to it today, if we can. We have jobs to do, you know.”
Shrug…
There\’s not a thing one can do to break through the voice mail impasse. Neither temper tantrums nor carefully reasoned arguments can influence digital recording devices. I am entirely at the mercy of the owners of the technology — IF they check their messages, IF they choose to respond, IF…
Simmering discontent
If I feel that way about voice mail, I can understand why rage might build among patients on wait-lists for essential surgery, among accused persons whose trial drags on indefinitely, among refugees whose status floats in limbo forever…
There\’s not a thing they can do about it, either. Dealing with Canada\’s medical, legal, and government bureaucracies must be like dealing with voice mail. Only worse.
I encountered Art Gans, an Anglican priest and military ethicist, in a gas station the other day. He needs back surgery to relieve constant pain.
There are, he told me, only two doctors in the province capable of doing this particular operation. But the Interior Health Authority cut back one of those surgeon\’s permitted operating time from two days a week to one.
Art\’s waiting time just went up to ten months.
“To say that I am pissed off would be a gross understatement,” he remarked.
More than medical
Almost all of us have personal connections to medical wait-lists. Most of us, fortunately, do not have to penetrate the court or immigration systems. So we are not as aware of even longer wait-lists in those areas.
What Vancouver Sun columnist Michael Smyth calls the “granddaddy” of government scandals, the trial of David Basi and Bob Virk for fraud and other corruption charges related to the $1-billion sale of B.C. Rail to CN Rail, has been on hold for almost four years.
In December 2003, RCMP raided government offices in Victoria. They carted out truckloads of documents. But so far, not one piece of evidence has been entered in the trial.
All hearings have dealt only with “disclosure” — basically, procedural debate over who\’s allowed to see what. The government has been trying to keep “secret” documents out of court. The defence, says Smyth, wants “every last e-mail and Post-it note coughed up for scrutiny.”
“The trial date has been put off five times,” Smyth comments. “But now things are finally coming to a head. Maybe.”
Meanwhile the reputations of Vasi and Kirk are put on hold. And the public cannot know if its own government acted dishonestly.
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Or consider the wait-lists afflicting immigrants and refugees. One example will suffice: Aba, a woman who fled from her native Ghana to avoid being forced into an unwelcome marriage. She was beaten and tortured until she agreed to marry a man she despised. But before the marriage could take place, she escaped.
Five years later, she\’s still waiting for the federal immigration department to decide whether she qualifies for refugee status. In the meantime, she has no status at all — not refugee, not resident, not an applicant for citizenship…
She has been rendered a nobody.
And let\’s not even think about how long Canada\’s First Nations people have been kept on hold, waiting for a settlement of their aboriginal land claims.
I sense a simmering discontent growing among Canadians about being treated as inconveniences, about being put on hold, sacrificed so that an institution can run more smoothly.
And I suspect that any politician who could outlaw wait-lists of all kinds — perhaps even voice mail! — would win a landslide victory.
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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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