People who make problems

Some people just want to make problems where none exist. Maybe they didn't get enough attention as children; maybe their kids ignore them every day; maybe they're not beaten as much they feel they should be. Whatever the reason, they dig and look for things to be wrong, and if nothing's wrong, there must be something they aren't noticing, so they create something.

Such is the case with one of the people I work with now. This particular individual had someone come to them and say there was a problem in our magic little elgibility checker because when the birthdate was run through, it came back invalid and said the person, who was born in 1985, was born in 1885, but this claim went ahead and went with the errored birthdate.

This being a little weird, I went ahead and dug in to find the problem. First thing I did was see if it would break again, but strangely, it didn't. I checked the screens in the eligibility system and the birthdate matched what was on the claim. The first oddity I noticed, though, was that the "screen shot" they'd sent in showing the 1985 birthdate was the screen where you ENTER the information; not the one that spits the correct patient info out. I would think that screen would have to show exactly what you enter into it...since it is manually entered.

Well, given that the birthdate on the claim was right, I looked at the screen where we actually do make the birthdate comparison and output the error if it doesn't match. Well, that screen only has a 6-digit birthdate: mmddyy. No century. This would mean that we can't be using the 18 vs. 19 as a comparison; in fact we only pop that in as an output for their benefit. I checked out the code and sure enough, it's a legit bug. But that means this didn't cause the birthdate not to match either.

Finally, I ran our favorite report in the entire world: Claim Changes History - All Fields. You see, the beauty of this report is that it gives every single change that was ever made to any claim. I ran it on the claim in question and - gasp! - the person who made the complaint changed the birthdate based on what we pulled back from the eligibility system three hours after it ran. This means our system worked just fine; they just wanted attention.

To shift back to cell phones...

I rather enjoyed this guy who had no problems whatsoever that called to say that the two phones he'd purchased and activated just that day wouldn't ring when someone called them. He stated you could make calls on them, and if you called the other phone, the voicemail would pick up but the phones would ring.

To "prove" this to me (while I'm blindly listening on the other side of the phone line), he made a call from one phone to another and held the phone up to the phone he was talking on to le me listen to the voicemail. Swell.

After the second listen, I asked him what screens show on the phones being called when they're being called (to see if they're "ringing," but maybe the ringer's off). He responded with one of my favorite responses: "You mean they have to be on?"

Um, yeah. To function, an electronic device must be "on."

Next to finally, there was the guy who called in to argue about his bill. Now, I got lots of these calls, and it was always convincing the person that the bill being $400 higher than normal is actually correct. This one was a bit different.

I had a guy call in and tell me that he has charges on his bill that he paid for, and he doesn't owe them. My answer? I agree. He didn't owe them. He did pay for them. He wanted a credit for them. Huh? He insisted that he did not owe the $250 his bill showed was due. I agreed. He only owed $70. He didn't believe me.

This argument went on for 30 minutes with my completely agreeing with his assessment of what he owed, but not crediting the charges he already paid. It was the only time I've ever had to try and convince a customer that he owed less than he thought he did. To make this just a bit more amusing, would you believe he never accepted my explanation? But he did agree to pay only $70...and no more!

And now the final one... Sometimes the queue time for customer service is a long wait. On this particular day, it was 20 minutes. That's 20 minutes you'll never get back. This joker not only waited the 20 minutes, but once on the line, he asked for a supervisor, and so I got him. What did he want?

"I just wanted to let you people know that your logo on the bill should be in black and white - not color." He just wanted to let us know we could save money by not printing the logo in color. How nice...

And he waited 20 minutes to tell us that.