Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
It’s one of my favorite scenes in the classic, long-running TV series MASH. Hawkeye and Trapper are trying to navigate Army red tape to get an incubator for their hospital. On the way, they encounter greed, compulsiveness, blind adherence to ridiculous regulations, and paranoia on an epic scale.
As they finally corner General Mitchell, the commander of supply during a press conference his response is this, “Now just a minute! This is a press conference! The last thing I want to do is answer a lot of questions!”
It is the world we live in compressed to a single sentence.
We moved my Mom to Homestead Living a few months ago. The facilities, services, and staff are top notch, we couldn’t ask for anything better. It’s been a difficult transition for her to try to compress almost 89 years of possessions into a single apartment, but she is gradually adjusting.
What is even more difficult is getting the long-term care insurance to pay on their agreement. She and my Dad paid into this insurance fund for decades, in anticipation of just this possibility. My Dad passed away six years ago and the insurance company scored a big hit, they just collected premiums. They didn’t have to pay at all.
That’s the game these fly-by-night organizations live on. Men pay more than women and statistically don’t live as long. Long-term care insurance CEOs get their yachts, vacations on the Riveria, and corporate tax breaks from not paying the policies they sell. It’s the perfect racket.
On the receiving end, monthly payments are rolling in, and on the other, no payments for most of their clients, and a grudging stall game for those that keep after them before they make any payment.
It is modern corporate America at work, and it will only get worse if deregulation gets an even stronger foothold.
They’ve found a system to placate even the angriest callers that call their “customer service” desk. Customer service is a title clearly defined as “doublespeak.”
For those of you who haven’t read George Orwell’s prophetic classic, “1984” it foretold the modern era with eery accuracy. Doublespeak was such a perfect term that it entered Webster’s dictionary soon after the book was published in 1949. Here is Webster’s definition: “Any language deliberately constructed to disguise or distort its actual meaning, often by employing euphemism or ambiguity. Typically used by governments or large institutions.”
I’m sure you’ve encountered it too, any time you’ve contacted customer service at any one of a thousand different companies.
When I call the “customer service” desk at this long-term care provider the expected, “Listen closely, because our menu has changed” is the first thing you hear. These guys are pros, you can’t just hit #3 to bypass the message, the keypad feature is timed to unlock only after all the messages are read. This is a stall tactic to get the angriest customers to hang up in disgust.
Once you do get the chance to hit the keypad, you’re asked to answer several questions to “better assist you.” Then you wait another few minutes before a human answers.
She (and it’s always a young woman) then proceeds to ask you the same questions again, since none of the previous automated answers are ever recorded to be used by the human you finally get to speak with. This is designed to disarm you, take you off balance, and add a little confusion.
Most of the time they’re dealing with the clients, usually people in their 80s or older who may not hear well, and who come from an era when institutions were trusted.
When the girl answers, she is friendly, willing to help, and knows nothing of your case, but she can ask someone for you.
You can’t speak with the person in charge of your case, but the helpful young woman can ask the question for you, put you on hold, and then respond in a few minutes. If you have additional questions, they just “lather, rinse, repeat” until hopefully you are worn out by the process and just go away.
That’s the corporate help desk in microcosm.
It’s not just insurance, try returning something defective upon arrival, and you’ll get the same song and dance.
The only company that consistently allows no-fault returns is Amazon. It’s one of the reasons they’re blowing out the competition in an ever-growing business model. It’s why owner Jeff Bezos is the wealthiest man in the world, worth an estimated $215 billion.
It’s not just the distant corporate headquarters in Atlanta, Chicago, or Minneapolis that practice this deception. We often find it here at home in our state government.
One of the banes of life as an IT Director in Wyoming’s 48 school districts is generating reports to the Wyoming Department of Education. When I left my IT Director position a little over a decade ago, there were 252 different reports that each district had to file with the WDE. It’s only gotten worse.
The frustration lies in the data itself. Almost every report asks for the same data but in a different format than the others. That way you can’t just boilerplate your district’s student data and paste it into the next inane report.
The problem, as usual, is political. Every time the state legislature funds an educational expenditure, or a federal agency provides funding through the WDE there is a report requirement. A unique report, we can’t just have answers, we have to have them in a special format that justifies the creation of a high-paid position associated with those funds. The same is true of every grant a district receives. They get the money, the IT department gets to generate a report and send it to Cheyenne, where a consultant gets a cushy job.
It is a vicious process.
One year, an especially insidious report was mandated. This one arrived via an e-mail to the 48 IT directors late on a Friday afternoon. The report was due Monday morning the following week.
It was convoluted, couldn’t be generated by any existing student management software, and had no bearing at all on the health, welfare, or education of the children. Yes, it was a perfect WDE exercise in control.
There was a backlash, few if any districts complied, none met the deadline.
A few weeks later the state conference was held in Casper.
At most WDE conferences the IT department isn’t required to attend, but this time all 48 directors, 46 men and two women were waiting in a conference room to hammer the creator of this latest report.
True to form, he didn’t show up. Instead, a pair of recent college graduates, maybe 22 or 23 years old, walked into the room, carrying binders in their arms just like college girls do when walking across campus, and sat down at the front table.
These two kids could have been the daughters of most of the people on the other side of the table. It wasn’t their fault that we wanted the head of their supervisor.
They sat there wide-eyed and tried to answer the few questions that were asked. Nobody was belligerent with them, but if their boss had showed up there was a good chance law enforcement might have been involved.
It was a win for the WDE, for the cowardly supervisor, and a testament to the process of distancing yourself from bad decisions via corporate structure.
There has to be a better way.