Ring Ring Bitches

1.) Don’t be nervous. I’m on anxiety pills, I’m human too, and for every time you stutter, I’ve probably already fucked up a voicemail to another patient. As long as you’re polite, I will give you five stars! 

2.) Don’t be embarrassed! When I ask for details about your symptoms, I’m not just being nosy. I really do need to know, to better help you. For guys: listen. I know I’m a girl, but so are the nurses. There’s really no difference, so just say what you need to say. I promise I’ve heard worse. Three testicles? Old news. Whatcha want.

3.) Don’t call to say, “I need an appointment for tomorrow.” Or, worse, “Does the doctor have any openings today?” Maybe my experience comes from working for a specialist, but there are never any openings today. Never! We’re booking patients out 2+ weeks out, even a month! What I have to go through to even attempt to get permission to squeeze you in sometime next week… just… listen. Either plan these things ahead of time, or go to the ER. 

4.) If “something came up” and you have to cancel your appointment for tomorrow, don’t get pissed off when I tell you the next opening is in two weeks. Need a sooner appointment? Well, you had one. You cancelled it. 

5.) If you honestly feel like you probably won’t go to your upcoming appointment, it would be great if you could cancel it in advance instead of waiting for the day of. Other people are in extreme pain, and could really use your spot if you don’t need it. Plus, the doctors get pissed off if you cancel same-day. Don’t piss off the doctors.

6.) If you call and get put on hold– THIS IS A BIG ONE– hanging up and calling back again and again is incredibly counter-intuitive!!!! The lines are on hold in order, and we answer them in order! If you hang up and call back, you’re just moving yourself continuously to the back of the line. If you can’t wait for two minutes for us to get to you, then call back later in the day. We’re not putting you on hold because we’re jerks; we’re putting you on hold because ten other people are calling at the same time.

7.) If I tell you that you have the wrong number… do not argue with me. Do not quote the people who gave you the number. Do not list google as your reference. Do not angrily repeat my phone number back to me like a magic spell to transform me into the correct operator. I know where I am. You have the wrong number. 

8.) If I tell you that you have the wrong number… do not ask to be transferred to the correct doctor’s office. What the fuck do you think this is? Do you think all doctor’s offices are magically connected and share one big phone system? Do you also call Domino’s and ask to be transferred to Pizza Hut? No!!!

9.) Similarly, I am NOT google. It is not my job to try to find out who you’re trying to reach. I can’t tell you how many people have demanded I give them the correct number when I tell them they called the wrong one. Imagine someone trying to get in touch with their Uncle Ben and dialing the wrong number, getting a stranger, then shouting at the stranger “WHAT’S MY UNCLE’S NUMBER!!!?” Bitch. I don’t know. Get better at googling. I have actual patients of ours to help.

10.) “I have an appointment at two o’clock Friday, but I need to move that to the morning instead.” Ha. Enjoy a morning appointment three weeks from now. By the week of, I promise the schedule is insanely concrete. There’s no room to rearrange. Make your goddamn appointment you made work, or wait. 

11.) I stg you better not call and say you want to talk to the doctor. Are you insane? Listen. The doctor does not actually care about you. They are assholes. However nice they are when you’re in the room with them, they are not going to go out of their way to come talk to you if they’re not being paid for it. Also, they’re busy as shit! Do you think when you don’t have an appointment, the doctors are just sitting around smoking cigars and chatting? They’re seeing other patients! They don’t have time to come to the phone ever!!!!

12.) Same with nurses. You need to talk to a nurse? Well, thank you for understanding that they’re more accessible than doctors, but they’re still super busy. I promise you can never, ever, talk to them when you actually call and ask for them. Accept that I will send them a phone message so they can set aside a time in their own schedules to call you back. Don’t call back in ten minutes and say you haven’t heard back from them yet. Honestly, it’s going to be at the tail-end of the day when all the patients are checked out. It’s not like the nurses are going to do their callbacks on their lunch hours. Shit. You gotta wait. (Granted, if it’s actually urgent, we can mark it as such and you’ll get a callback sooner.)

13.) If you requested a callback from the nurse…. answer it. I’m not into this mediating phone tag shit. They had one window to try to call you before they got too busy again. You missed it. It’s your fault, not mine. 

14.) Honesty time. When I can tell that you’re an asshole who doesn’t want to leave a message for the nurse, I’ll say, “Let me see if she’s available real quick.” You think I’m putting you on hold in order to contact the nurse for you. I am not. I’m just counting to seven or so before picking your line back up. Cuz you know what? If I actually call back to the nurses, and they actually do answer, I will get my ass chewed out for expecting them to take a call right then. The only time I’ll actually “check real quick” is if I see on your account that they just called you and you missed a call. But for the first timers, no. You’re just on hold.

15.) When you call, and don’t say your name or anything, I may already act like I’ll take care of your request. You might be tempted to “catch me in a lie” and rudely say, “Don’t you need to know who I am??” No, I don’t. Because guess what? I’m not just sitting there not doing shit. I said I’ll take care of it, so I will. I didn’t need your goddamn name. We have caller ID, you dumbass. We can search you by your phone number. 

16.) This one is more for specialists than general practitioners: don’t call and say, “Yeah I’d like an appointment.” when you’re not even our patient. There’s a long process to getting an appointment with us. You’re not gonna like it, but that’s not my fault. I’m telling you kindly our policies. No reason to cuss me out.

back to nicer tips!

17.) Know your insurance! For Blue Cross Blue Shield, be 100% sure you know if it’s PPO or HMO. It’ll say so on a little briefcase icon at the bottom corner of your card. PPO is good! No problems! If it’s HMO, you can’t do shit without authorizations. They’re hell to get. You can’t keep an appointment without a current authorization number from your PCP. It’s all total shit. Be aware of that!

Also, be aware of the limitations of Medicaid. That includes Medicaid replacements like Cigna Healthsprings and STAR PLUS. I can tell you that it sucks to be a medicaid new patient and try to see a specialist for something. Doctors do not get paid for seeing medicaid patients, so a lot of them won’t even accept medicaid. Those that do accept it only want like one medicaid patient per week, which means if you or your kid have a health problem and need to come see this specialist, it will literally be months before the next opening. 

18.) If you received a call from a doctor’s office, please listen to the voicemail before calling back! There are a shit ton of people in any given office, and generally they’re all operating under the same phone number. We phone operators have no way in hell of knowing who called you. Listen to the voicemail, and either call back and say the name of the person who called, or say the reason. Those things are always going to be in the message. Calling back and saying, “I got a message from Monica,” or “someone called about moving my appointment?” will do wonders, I promise. Otherwise, I’ll probably end up just telling you, “If it’s important, I guess they’ll call back,” cuz I don’t know who the fuck to transfer you to.

19.) Give me details when I ask for them, not when I don’t. I have other calls. I don’t need to know where you went last week or what your parent’s coworkers thought about whatever. This is not a hotline open for chatting. Think of other people, even hospitals and doctors offices, that are on hold while you’re telling me shit I don’t care about.

20.) Don’t get mad at me. Encourage others not to get mad at me. The people who answer the phones have nothing to do with anything, in all honesty. Whatever got screwed up, it wasn’t us. Don’t give me that shit about “they just need to take it out on someone”– no. Don’t do that. One mean person can ruin my week. Be nice to phone operators. Sometimes they can’t help, but that’s not their fault. They’re trying their best. In fact, they tend to be trying harder than anyone else in the fucking office, cuz they’re the ones dealing with the worst people and most urgent problems. And taking care of shit for you that it was someone else’s job to do but they fucking failed and you’re calling about it, so that’s on us now. Yes, I’ll go fax that imaging order over to Radiology right now, even though I have other calls and my own job to do and there are two other girls in the office who were supposed to have sent this order three weeks ago.

21.) Oh, friendly reminder that the people who answer the phones are not always the receptionists. Departments usually have their own phone operators in charge of transferring calls everywhere else. But when you’re calling, don’t start talking to me like you just saw me at the desk. I’m not there. You’ve never seen me. Want to talk to them? I can transfer you. But I’m not them. 

22.) If you’ve ever been to see your doctor and they mention referring you to some specialist or other, be sure to say whether or not you actually want that. Quietly agreeing with the secret intention of never following up with that other doctor inconveniences that other office! It would be better to tell your pcp straight out that you don’t really want a referral. That way I don’t have to call you and leave voicemails about making appointments if you don’t want to.

23.) If the phone rings more than usual before an operator picks up, we’re either on other lines trying to tell those patients to please hold on a second OR we literally right then stuffed food in our mouths and are chewing furiously to try to get to the point where we can manage to tell you to hold. 

24.) Please don’t be the last call of the day. Just remembered something and you noticed it’s like 4:58 and the office closes at 5? Please save it. We are counting the seconds until we’re allowed to roll the phones and go home. Don’t keep us there after 5 just because you wanted to call us at the worst damn time.

25.) Also it’d be great if you didn’t call the second we open. We’re still half-dead, barely awake, slowly going through the steps of accepting we have to do this for another eight hours today. Better if you wait like an hour. 

1. The “So you’re just gonna let me die?!” People. Spoiler alert: they’re not dying. They’re just incredibly selfish and have no comprehension of how doctors’ offices work. They would rather you kick someone else off the schedule to make room for them than wait an extra two days. Zero understanding that other people with problems exist.

2. The “Don’t you need to know who I am?” People. They pay their service providers extra for caller ID, but don’t seem to realize that we can pull up their account with their phone number. Make demands without introductions, listen to you give them their appointment information, and still accusingly snap that you didn’t ask for their name at the very end of the conversation.

3. The “You should have that in the system” People. Get weirdly offended when you ask them for demographic information. They insist that you must already know, rather than accept that you’re asking because you don’t. Zero knowledge that computer systems can change with time and information needs occasional updating.

4. The “I just wanted to hear your voice” People. They call to ask if the operator is married. They want to meet the operator next time they come to the doctor’s office. Creepy but ironically confident, considering the operator their flirting with knows all of their health problems.

5. The “Can’t you do it anyway?” People. Always angry when presented with any rules or policies. Expect everything to bend to their will. Never ready to compromise. Truly awful disregard for the law.

6. The “What’s your name?!” People. They only ask that question as a threat, ready to take it to a manager because they believe that the operator is purposefully antagonizing them by following the office code.Will unwittingly complain about that operator to the same operator on the next call, unable to recognize voices. 

7. The Scrambled Priority Cancelers. Can’t make it to their appointment with a specialist because they have to go to the dentist. When they reschedule, they want it to be the very next day. Very angry when they can’t get back in quickly on short notice. Never occurs to them to cancel their dentist appointment instead.

8. The “I need an appointment now” People. Almost always a non-urgent matter, but don’t tell them that. They want to come in today because it’s their day off. Were not intelligent enough to call in advance. Don’t understand that a specialist is booked out for weeks at a time. Alternatively, they want to come in today because they do have a semi-urgent problem, and they need it fixed now simply because they’re going to the Bahamas in two days. Included in this category are people with dire health concerns that want a surgery scheduled immediately– before their vacation.

9. The “Yes I’m a current patient” People. Absolutely no concept of time whatsoever. Consider themselves current even if they last saw the doctor in 2007. Get incredibly angry when you call them a new patient. Don’t want to follow any new patient policies. 

10. The anesthesiologist’s cousin’s friend’s wife. Even though the operator was just doing their job and following company rules, because this person was angry and knew a guy who knows a guy who has the doctor’s number, the operator gets in massive trouble. 

11. The “WHAT?!” People. Impossibly deaf, yet still make all their own phone calls. Forces the operator to scream into the receiver. Still doesn’t understand what they’re saying. Guaranteed to get all of their appointment information wrong. Doesn’t seem to realize that they could always get a not-deaf family member to call for them.

12. The Never-Had-a-Conversation-Before People. Appear to have no knowledge whatsoever of normal social courtesies. Operator answers the call, then listens calmly as the patient introduces themselves and their issue. Ridiculously, three words in, the patient screams, “HELLO?” as though they don’t understand that the reason the operator went quiet for one second was because they were listening to the patient. Do they expect the operator to talk while they’re talking? No one knows.

13. The Ungodly Impatient People. Similar to those above, these patients will not give the operator anything but an inhuman lack of time to perform any task. If the operator goes quiet for half of half of a millisecond, the patient begins to scream thinking the call was dropped. Believe for some reason that anything the operator is doing should be ridiculously instantaneous.

14. The “varuhumph latmfunmf” People. What the fuck are they saying? Do they have a tongue at all? What language is this?!!!

15. The “shhhhhhzsttshhssss” People. Do you have the absolute worst cellular service ever? Is it right this second losing its very last bar of signal? Probably the perfect time to call your doctor’s office!

16. The “you transferred me to a voicemail” People. Blame you for other employees not answering their phones. Apparently lack the understanding that when other employees don’t answer, it will go to voicemail. Accuse you of purposefully transferring them to a voicemail instead of the person they asked for. Will never under any circumstances actually leave a message.

17. The “Can’t YOU just help me, then?” People. Often similar to the category above. When they can’t get in touch with the employee they need, they expect the operator to switch job descriptions. Won’t accept that the operator is only there to answer the phones and transfer calls.

18. The “I keep getting put on hold!” People. Call during the busiest hour of the day. Rather than wait their turn, they hang up and call back repeatedly, always putting themselves back at the end of the line. Extremely furious when they finally get answered. Think the phones are broken or the operators are purposefully not answering calls.

19. The Exaggerators. Yell things like “I was on hold for thirty minutes!” unironically anytime they were placed on hold for over sixty seconds. Will complain to doctors and managers using these exaggerations, and unfairly always receives the benefit of the doubt. Will also waste no time twisting the operator’s words and getting them in more trouble with blatant lies.