Thirty-Six Days

One thing is for sure--I am tired. Today kept me hopping.

I rolled out of my driveway at 7:30 a.m. with Brother and Smiley, the two feral brothers, headed to the vet for a snip.

I then traveled nearly a hundred miles to an appointment with my own doctor so she could get me squared away with six months of prescriptions, hopefully enough to tide me over until I can find a physician in Europe. That’s going to be tricky, since I’m a U.S. resident and have U.S. coverage, but Americans do find doctors in other countries, so it’s possible. I just have to learn the right way to go about it. With the health issues I have (lupus,) access to proper medical care is going to be critical.

Those things accomplished, I ran errands in town and grabbed a bite of dinner, came home and spent two hours getting paperwork faxed to the airline about the dogs traveling with me. Both are small dogs riding in the cabin and not in cargo, which takes a lot more finagling than you might think. But I believe we’re set. I certainly hope, anyway.

Recounting all of this, I realize it sounds a lot more painless than it actually was. I left out the part about breaking my ass (again) doing yoga and squabbling with the vet techs to the point I got a personal phone call from the vet himself. Yeah. I’d better back up and do some ‘splainin.

First of all, when I say “doing yoga,” put images of lovely, graceful stretchy poses and human pretzels out of your mind. I have lupus with a side helping of rheumatoid arthritis. This means shit don’t work right--not bones, not tendons, not muscles--and some days the best I can do is sit with my legs stretched out in front of me and dream longingly of touching my toes. The movements do help, though, so I keep at it even though my connective tissues are virtually petrified.

I got a little cocky this morning and stretched to far. For the second time in six months, I hear a loud “KAPOW!” from the general vicinity of my sacrotuberous ligament. Except this time it’s on the opposite side...and I still haven’t fully healed from the first injury. So now I’m bilaterally gimpy and sitting on ice packs again. This sucks. All I did was try to touch my freaking toes.

The last thing I needed after this was attitude from somebody who gets paid because people like me choose to bring our money to their place of business. Let me say before I go any further that this was not our regular vet, nor was it the spay/neuter clinic my rescue usually uses. It’s a vet clinic in the neighboring state that has a good low-cost spay/neuter option that I use when I need an appointment in a hurry. I won't bore you with details about how I offended the vet tech who met me at my car to help me get the wild boys in, but let's just say she communicated her grievance to the other staff, and by the time I got inside, I was persona non grata. Especially when I had the nerve to inquire about the possibility of boarding the dogs overnight (remember the 100 mile drive I had to my own doctor appointment afterward?) I was told they would charge me $75 per dog if I didn’t pick them up that afternoon between 3 and 5.

You can imagine my displeasure at hearing this. I informed them I would be there at 2:30 to pick the dogs up in that case to ensure I made it to my own appointment on time.

Twenty minutes later, the veterinarian himself called me. I could hear in his voice that he was loaded for bear--God knows what those nitwits had said to him. When I explained the situation and told him the quote I’d been given for overnight boarding, he was appropriately horrified. He was happy to keep the dogs overnight for me at roughly half the cost for both dogs than the office staff tried to charge me for one of them.

I guess the reason I’m writing about this here is because I made a greater observation during this incident than just the fact that the vet techs got mad at me for expecting proper service. I saw America at its finest today, entitlement in its truest form. Here you have a bunch of young girls running around in hospital scrubs feeling very important, even though they draw an hourly salary and haven’t invested one tenth of the blood, sweat, and tears that the veterinarian shed earning his DVM and opening a fully accountable practice in a real-world environment. They don’t have to worry about overhead, bills coming due, or the cost of supplies or insurance. A customer does something they don’t like, it’s easy and maybe even a little fun to put them in their place by quoting bogus prices--having that teeny bit of power over other people is quite a thrill. I’m sure some snickering went on behind my back at my reaction to that $150 quote for boarding two dogs, because I made it quite clear that hell would freeze over before I’d pay it.

Well, the veterinarian didn’t find it so funny. He’s a businessman, and he saw an easy forty bucks almost pissed away by some twat-brain salaried employee who had a bit of fun at a paying client’s expense. I have no idea if anyone got the rough side of his tongue over this incident or not, but for me, it illustrated beautifully the widening values gap between those who’ve worked for what they have and those who’ve had everything handed to them.

Am I making assumptions about the vet tech staff that may not be true? Possibly. But my observations about customer service and work ethic have been consistent across a wide slice of American culture and variety of service-oriented businesses. Hell, even retail-oriented businesses. Take the Lidl in Richmond, for example.

Ten minutes after the store closed at nine p.m., my friend and I were asked to stop shopping and go to the register for checkout. Now, I’m not terribly old, at least compared to Moses and Methuselah. But I’m tempted to say here that “in my day,” closing time meant the doors were locked to incoming customers, but those already pushing a buggy stuffed full of items were allowed to finish spending their money in that location, and the more of it they spent, the better. Needless to say, we left the shopping cart full of grocery items sitting in the middle of the aisle and walked out without contributing a dime to Lidl profits for that day.

I suppose the store manager who required that we stop shopping figured they were making enough money already and did not need ours. Or perhaps, this mentality trickled down from Lidl Corporate, if they’re among the big box retailers who set the registers and lights on a timer controlled by someone hundreds or thousands of miles away...whatever the case, I’m glad business is so good for them that they can afford to treat paying customers that way. I’ll certainly never spend another dime in that store.

Okay. So there you have it--my rant for the day. Does it have anything to do with my countdown to takeoff? Maybe. Let’s just say I’m eager to see how customer service in other parts of the world stack up to what’s becoming the depressing standard for good old U.S.A.

Other Posts in this Series

Forty Days
Thirty-Nine Days
Thirty-Eight Days
Thirty-Seven Days

cover image source
image 2 source: moi
image 3 source
image 4 source
image 5 source: moi