In one of my past lives, I was a medical biller for a private physician. I got to behold all sorts of people and episodes of lunacy. It was an odd time for me; kind of a bridge between my late teens and actually deciding to act like an adult (I’m still not very good at it but I practice a lot).
I got the job through what you might refer to as nepotism (my mother was the office manager). The appearance of nepotism stopped there though. I was my own man and soon had the place marching to my beat. Plus I never listened to my mom at home, so why start at work?
One of the interesting things I saw was a mother and daughter coming in for visits. They scheduled them on the same day. I thought it was a little odd but at least they were getting good care. The mother was on Medicare (I remember weird stuff).
Part of the fun of making the place my own was establishing a manly presence. The doctor wasn’t always around and didn’t exactly behave like the ape from which we allegedly sprung. SInce I was the only male in a building full of females, I used it to the best advantage of which I was capable (even if I wasn’t all that capable).
One of the lovely people I worked with was a few years younger but married. This lady simply did not get sex. She understood the mechanics but did not understand the fuss over it. It was just something her husband really enjoyed that she let him have every now and then.
This lady was a really great person to work with but I spent her entire tenure trying to figure out where the disconnect was in reference to sex. She told me that a bunch of her girlfriends came over one night and gave her the whole treatment: makeup, lingerie, and whatever else in preparation for her husband. She said it was ‘nice’ but that was it.
Part of the fun of working with my mother was having her see me experimenting to find out what I could get away with in the office (or overall). One day while in pursuit of the non-sex coworker answer, I managed to get her to take her top off (I have no recall how I managed to make this happen).
My mother is standing in the doorway as Medical Theater<tm> is playing itself out. When the top comes off, her mouth drops a bit. I shoot her the old Eyebrow, which was a signal for ‘don’t say anything – let me see how far I can go with this.’
At this point you’re probably wondering exactly what kind of doctor’s office this was, where the male biller got the receptionist to take her shirt off, in full view of the office manager.
It was my office – that’s what kind.
So my interest was rising (moreso) at this point. All I had to do was get her to take off her bra. Along with failing to get sex, she failed to get why I wanted to look at her without her shirt. Unfortunately she didn’t want to take off her bra, which really frustrated me.
It’s not what you’re thinking… at this point it was an intellectual challenge of my abilities. I just wanted to see how far she would go. It wasn’t about seeing naked breasts.
Of course I’m lying out my backside. I did want to see if I could get her to take off her bra, but the primary reason was to see if I could. The naked breasts were just the icing.
Unfortunately things went no further, in spite of the fact that cake is merely a vehicle to carry the icing. And I was Howard Stern long before I heard him 🙂
I discovered one of the biggest Chick Magnets ever: chocolate. I maintained an entire drawer full of chocolate and candy, becoming known as the Candy Man throughout the building. All sorts of people would drop by for a piece. When you’re short of Opposite Sex Skills, candy is a great facilitator. And heaven knows I was short of Opposite Sex Skills. Not much has changed.
The doctor’s specialty was gastroenterology. I wondered aloud if he had a subspecialty in psych because the majority of his patients were nuts (that’s a medical term). Unsatisfied with just my own damn near medical opinion, I went in search of others. I asked the people in the hospitals where the doctor had privileges. They assured me that his patients were absolutely and completely insane. Normal gastro patients are nuts to begin with but ours were a step above.
After further consultation with the doctor, during which I let him know what the hospital people thought about his patients, I asked if craziness bred ulcers or ulcers bred craziness. I never got a real answer from him. He had a thing about not giving actual answers. He’d mumble a bit, say something that was completely unrelated to the topic, and walk out of the room.
Aside from that, the doctor had a few other ‘interesting’ traits. He was a control freak, the likes of which I have not seen since. He would not lease a postage machine because people would send things out before he saw them. Oh yeah, and he’d have to pay for it. He really didn’t like paying for things. It was borderline pathological with him, the dear boy. While setting up his office, the furniture hadn’t arrived so he convinced the hospital to lend him a few chairs til his arrived. I think the delivery truck got lost about twenty years ago because those same hospital chairs are still in the waiting room. I wonder what they told the families of the truck driver… alien abduction, perhaps?
Another tiny foible of the doctor’s was time. I know, I know… you’re shocked that a doctor would keep any patient waiting, but unfortunately this was also pathological. To this day the problem has never been diagnosed, no less solved. The patients had to wait from day one. The only thing that changed was the length of the wait. When I started it was up to thirty minutes. Eight years later when I left it was an hour and a half on the average, but could go past two hours if he was really in the mood. No one had any idea what he did while keeping people waiting for two hours but the wait was guaranteed.
The office staff tried to outsmart the doctor by booking hours later in the day. They were no match for a medical doctor though – he just came in later too. The next tactic was telling patients to show up half an hour after their appointment time. Doctor invalidated this by continuing to be later. Then they told the patients to call on the phone and we could tell them how far behind he was really running. If by some strange coincidence the doctor came into the office and didn’t see a waiting and waiting room full of people, he’d either leave the office again or take a brief nap (we were to wake him in twenty minutes).
The obvious question here is why did the patients tolerate this. The unobvious answer is that when people leave the house, they sometimes forget their brains (assuming there was anything to forget in the first place). Another factor that amplifies the brain situation is that when people get in front of a rushed doctor, they tend to shake their head in agreement a lot and not do any critical thinking. Even if they swore before they left the house that they’d ask the question about that funny growth on their back that has started speaking to them in Russian, the moment they get near the doctor, they forget. This is made more unpleasant by the fact that the growth has started yelling louder and is getting more abusive by the day. People are beginning to talk. It’s not like the old days, when a growth could engage you in conversation for weeks without anybody interrupting. I used to take the bus with a fellow who would have animated full length conversations with various body parts. Fortunately whatever he had never got bad enough to have conversations with anybody else’s body parts – that would have been just plain weird.
The patients were forever forgetting something, whether it was their referrals, their copayments, or their appointments. My favorite excuse ever was the patient that couldn’t come to the doctor’s office because she was sick.
The doctor’s office is where I began my fascination with computers. After some minor pleading (5 years worth) the doctor decided to computerize the practice. After much salesman abuse, he finally coughed up the money to bring in a network.
I stayed late on installation evening in case I was needed. Good thing too, as I was needed (not to mention curious). We managed to get the system up by morning. It ran on a Novell network, which I had never seen before. I spent a lot of time figuring out how it worked, which consisted largely of poking at things until they broke, then seeing if I could fix them. Fortunately for me, I proved to be competent.
The doctor, upon seeing the whole installation for the first time, stood there for a few moments, looked around, and said, “The tv screen. It doesn’t match the computer. Can’t they get us one that matches?”
He was not what you’d call tech savvy. In fact it would be more accurate to refer to him as tech-terrified. For the years that system was in use, he literally never touched it. He paid to have a terminal in his office but it served mostly to be in the way and as a stand for papers and other detritus.
Because of his fear of the computer, he naturally assumed everyone else was terrified too. This proved amusing when one day some labels got caught in the printer. The only way to get the printer back in operation was to take it apart and remove the errant labels. Or send it away to Tokyo. I decided on the former, which apparently was not what he had in mind.  He walked in one day (late, as usual) and saw me with many printer pieces strewn about my desk. I thought the poor guy was going to lose control of his bowels. He started stammering and asking what I was doing. Did I know anything about this equipment? Didn’t anyone call service? What if I broke it? What would we do? Heavens!
So I fixed it and put the thing back together.  Unfortunately for him, the cat was out of the bag with reference to his terror at seeing me taking things apart. This meant that whenever possible, it became my duty (moreso) to take things apart.  One day I cleaned out the computer, which was full of dust and dirt. The look on his face was priceless. I had to try really hard not to laugh while I told him that I wasn’t exactly sure what I was doing and didn’t know if I could put the case back together.
I learned a lot about computers. I got the doctor to agree to send me to Novell classes. Unfortunately I got an education by immersion. A few weeks after the technician put in the network, he had a heart attack and died. I thought they were playing a joke on me when I called his house and they told me he had left us. Poor guy hadn’t hit forty.
After a while I got bored and started looking for computer work. One thing that hammered itself home during every job I held was that it was much better to work with computers than with people. One could say I was uniquely suited for this even before I discovered computers.  There are some people who are born to be in retail or customer service. I am not one of them.  I secured a job as a computer technician for almost twice what I was making as a biller.
In a stroke of sheer irony, I occasionally do some computer consulting for the doctor. The last time I was in his office, I saw a claim form from two old patients. It was the mother and the daughter that I met years before. This time both the mother and the daughter were on Medicare.
No, I am not getting old.