Lately I’ve been spending a lot of my time asking people to do their jobs correctly or straight up doing their jobs for them. First, there was the mailman who decided he’d rather leave a note in my mailbox saying my package was at the office instead of, you know, actually delivering it to me. I was home all day when this happened, so I know for a fact he didn’t try knocking on my door. Normally I wouldn’t be too pissed about this, but it was a package from Amazon and I pay them $99 a year for Prime which entitles me to two-day delivery, not two days plus one night in the office and a jaunty walk to pick it up. They’re supposed to use UPS for shipping, but UPS sometimes gets the US Postal Service to deliver their packages. Weird, I know, and far less efficient. The UPS man has always knocked on my door. The mailman pulled this same shit before Christmas too, the day before I left for the holidays, so I didn’t end up getting that package until a week later. The window in my home office looks directly at the mailbox gazebo, so every time I see my mailman’s little mail truck outside I give him the evil eye, but I don’t think he’s noticed.
Then there was the podiatrist’s office that charged me $75 for a co-pay in January after I’d injured my foot. I swore my co-pay should have been $50, so I checked my health insurance claims info a month later and I was right, they’d overcharged me by $25. I waited a few months for a refund to come, but it didn’t. So I had to write a letter explaining their error, which was followed by a call from their office asking for a copy of my health insurance card, which was followed by me mailing that copy to their office, and finally ended with me getting my check the next month. Lesson of this story: Don’t try overcharging a chronically ill person. We know to check our billing statements.
And you shouldn’t get me started on the ongoing billing error saga that I had last year with my primary physician. I got billed for a whooping cough vaccination literally a year after I had the vaccination, which was weird in itself. I paid my bill promptly and had the cancelled check to prove it, yet the bill was not marked as paid in the system and they kept threatening to take me to collections about it. (If I’d been taken to debtor’s prison at least I knew I wouldn’t catch whooping cough there.) It took a phone call, a trip down to the doctor’s office, a letter, another phone call and another letter to sort the whole thing out. I hope someone there is embezzling, because that’s the only reasonable explanation I can think of for why the billing got so screwed up. I temped at a bank one summer and those ladies were hardcore about balancing at the end of the day. If your balance was off, you had to go through all your transactions for the day and figure out where you’d screwed up.
As frustrating as these incidents have been, it makes me really appreciate the times someone does their job well, like the cashier at Joann’s who walked me through how to sign up for their text alerts and get a 20% off coupon on my phone when the coupon I brought turned out to have expired. Or the lady who worked at the post office I used in Indianapolis who was always happy and energetic and moved people through her line quickly. The fact that I still remember her years later shows how exceptional I thought she was.
It’s also made me look at myself and realize I don’t always put 100% into my job. There are some emails I never got around to answering. There have been plenty of times when I’ve pushed a deadline back. And then back again. Which must be frustrating to my clients. When I eventually do get the work done, I think I do it well. But scheduling and project management are skills I’m still working on perfecting, and that probably shows at times. So, I apologize if there have been times I have not done my job well. I know how annoying that is!
I wish we lived in a world where everyone loved their jobs and did them well all the time. Instead we seem to live in a world where people hate their jobs or are bored by their jobs or think they can get away with slacking on their jobs or don’t know how to do their jobs well. I suppose most of us would rather not have jobs at all. But if you have a job and do it well, I applaud you.
Photo by Jinx! / CC BY-SA 2.0
Natalie says
July 27, 2015 at 8:11 pmAt the moment I am having an ongoing saga getting a leak in my roof repaired. The interior ceiling is covered by insurance so I have no control over who or when there, but I’ve had to deal with the insurer, the parent company of the repairer, the repairer’s boss, and the actual repairer. All nice people, but I wish it was just one person to deal with!
The exterior tiles are my responsibility and that is involving so many phone calls and visits and leaving messages and getting it repaired but it leaked again and getting them to come back and it is driving me crazy. The interior guys can’t get on with it until the leak is fixed so I have no ceiling and everything from that roof stored elsewhere and it’s been a couple of months now.
Jennette Fulda says
July 27, 2015 at 8:33 pm@Natalie – Oy, stories like that make me think my problems with a rented place aren’t that bad.
Kelly says
July 28, 2015 at 11:37 amI have similar issues with our mail woman. She will squeeze as much as she can into our mailbox so she doesn’t have to get out of her delivery truck. And package delivery is a joke. This past January, a package was supposedly deliver. I know they hadn’t, since I happened to have been working from home. She claimed adamantly that the package had been delivered. The company ended up just shipping us a new order. No big. In March, there was another package (the outfit for our son’s 1st birthday from Carter’s) that was out for delivery, but never appeared. I called, she claimed that out for delivery didn’t mean that it was out for delivery, and she had no idea where it was. The next day, the January package magically found it’s way to our door, with some note that said something like no one was available to take the package. My son’s outfit never showed up, but we were at least able to get a refund from Carter’s. The only recourse I have is to write a letter to the post master general, OF THE UNITED STATES. Yeah, that’s going to be super effective.
Jennette Fulda says
July 28, 2015 at 4:13 pm@Kelly – Oy, my brother and sister-in-law have had similar problems in Chicago. Frequently Amazon packages just don’t get delivered, so they have to contact Amazon who sends a replacement. I wonder how much Amazon loses every year because of that.
gingerzingi says
July 30, 2015 at 6:03 amAlthough I’ve had my share of experiences like this, I’m going to take the opposite view and say that most people WANT to perform their jobs well, but aren’t able to because of nonsensical procedures required by their organization or because of their boss’s interference and time-wasting diversions.
You’ve worked for yourself so long, I think you’re underestimating the inefficiencies and stupidities of most companies. The billing errors could easily be the result of Boss X throwing a useless project onto Clerk A, who has to shift her responsibilities onto Intern B, who doesn’t have a clue how to do billing. It’s not that Clerk A or Intern B aren’t TRYING to do a good job, but they’ve essentially been prevented from doing so.
Not that I’m speaking from experience, or anything…
Jennette Fulda says
July 30, 2015 at 2:24 pm@gingerzingi – That might be so, but unless the mailman has a broken leg or some other physical disability, he should have delivered the package to my door. I live about 40 yards from the mailbox gazebo, so it’s not even a long walk.
Melissa Allen says
August 6, 2015 at 11:51 amCurrently I am working on getting a second dish washer. When the first broke it was a month before a new one was ordered and installed. I was not particularly nice to the people who were in charge of this process as I had to wash all the dished for our family of four for a month and they were really less then concerned. When the new dishwasher broke I tried a a new tactic. I was humorous in my emails complaining that my manicure was ruined and that the repairman didn’t call, write or send flowers. This resulted in a slightly shorter wait to get the dishwasher fixed. It is now broken AGAIN not sure what path to take this time perhaps a humor/ anger combo. Honestly though, how can you offer such a shotty product and be so bad a your job and still be in business?
On another note i love reading your blog. Good luck with your mailman.
Marilyn says
August 8, 2015 at 9:54 amHi, A little late to the party perhaps yet, here I am.
I am siding with gingerzingi. When tasks get reassigned and the newest/ untrained takes on tasks it’s not a win/win
They use their logic to solve other tasks. They are brillant and logical and helpful yet their process just shows up how illogical and silly and crooked the process is to accommodate Sally who continues to process as if it were a paper world not a paperless, uploaded, electronic transmission world.
Then, Sally gets all nasty and evil to the newest member of the team rather than retiring because 44 years at a company is ???what not enough what???. Sally needs to go and needs to be pushed out.