I burned my hand quite severely on cooking oil in a freak accident while working as a chef. I got quick help from the local hospital that saved my fingers, and I got some paid sick leave for a couple of months to recuperate. The nurse who took care of my poor hand said that I needed to get the wound redressed every day until someone told me otherwise. 

I decided to use the time to visit some friends and relatives in the capital, to catch up while my hand healed. I went to a local clinic to get my wounds redressed. The line moved with the speed of a stoned slug, but after a few eons, it became my turn.

Part of the story is that I have a very “rural” west-Swedish accent that, despite my best efforts, is very pronounced and makes me sound like something of a yokel. 

Me: “Hi! I need my hand redressed.”

Receptionist: “Do you have an appointment?”

Me: “No, unfortunately not. I’m not from here; I’m from [Town]. So—”

Receptionist: *Snorts* “Well, you need an appointment.”

Me: “Well… I can’t. I don’t live here, and I need my hand redressed. I thought that you maybe could help me?”

Receptionist: “We are very busy here. You can’t just barge in and demand healthcare.”

Me: “I’m not demanding. I’m sorry if it seems that way. I am just visiting here to see some friends since I cannot work right now. According to my nurse in [Town], my hand needs redressing every day.”

Receptionist: *In a condescending tone* “Well, maybe she should’ve checked with someone before telling you that?”

Me: “What?”

Receptionist: “How can she know that?”

Me: “Um… well… she was the one who bandaged my wound after my burn incident, after the doctor concluded that I didn’t suffer nerve damage.”

Receptionist: “Okay, then. Maybe they should also do the redressing, then? We are very busy.”

Me: “I’m… not currently in [Town]. I’m here. In front of you. And I need healthcare.”

Receptionist: “Go to the emergency room if you need urgent care. We can’t help with that.”

Me: “Look, I don’t need urgent care. I just need what I think is a standard procedure, just a simple redressing. I am sure that any one of your nurses could do this in the blink of an eye. I’ve heard good things about this place.”

Receptionist: “I’m suuure you have.”

There was an awkward silence.

Me: “Okay… Well, I have brought a book and can sit here for the rest of the day until someone — anyone — has time for me. I’m not in a hurry.”

Receptionist: “Oh, you brought a book? How good for you!”

More awkward silence.

Me: “Do you think you can help me?”

Receptionist: “Well, I’m not a nurse, am I?”

I was stunned by her absolute disregard for my need for help.

She was the only receptionist on duty, and this had taken a lot of time. A white-clad nurse came marching in to see what the hold-up was since patients were complaining that they could not register their arrival due to the “discussion”.

Nurse: “Is there a problem here?”

Receptionist: “This man just refuses to leave.”

Nurse: *Turning to me* “If you have been asked to leave, why are you still here?”

Me: *Exasperated* “She hasn’t told me that! Look, mate.”

I held my very bandaged hand in front of her.

Me: “I came here to ask for a simple redressing. It is a burn wound, and my nurse in [Town] told me that it needed to be redressed every day without fault. I trust people in white when they tell me stuff like that. Is it possible for me to have this redressed? I can wait the whole day, if needed.”

Nurse: “Well, of course, we can do that.”

She looked confusedly at the receptionist.

Nurse: “[Receptionist], what is the problem?”

Receptionist: “HE HASN’T GOT AN APPOINTMENT”

Nurse: “Well, duh, he’s obviously from [Town], and that is halfway across the Kingdom.” *To me* “I’ve got time. Come!”

The receptionist yelled something like, “You need an appointment!” after us, but the sound was cut off by the nurse and me going into a spare room. She quickly found that the wound was REALLY complicated and asked me to wait.

She returned with an ancient nurse who probably took care of Odin after his eye was removed. She in turn asked for permission to fetch some students; this severe burn wound was apparently some kind of great learning opportunity. My wound was redressed with great skill under the gaze of no less than two nurses, one young doctor (AT-läkare), six nurse students, and two doctor students. I had apparently caught them during a freak window where most of the staff had little to do; a lot of patients had cancelled their appointments at the last minute that day, and the students had no documentation to catch up with.

I got formal, actual appointments with the nurse for the rest of my three-week stay, with longer breaks between the redressings as the wound healed. She instructed a few of the nurses on how to redress the wound every time, and I gave them recipes and cooking tricks in return. The receptionist glared at me with murderous intent every time.

On the last day, I asked the Ancient Wise One:

Me: “Hey, what’s up with the receptionist?”

Ancient One: “It would be unprofessional for me to talk about the private life of a colleague.”

Me: “Fair enough.”

Ancient One: “But she often talks about when she dated a man from [Town], about your age and with your accent, some twenty years ago. He crushed her heart when she discovered that she was the side piece, and she tells us at least once a week that men from [Town] are the least trustworthy men on the face of the planet. But it is just common knowledge that men like you are very treacherous.” *Winks*

My fingers healed up without even a scar. I can’t see that they were ever damaged, and I invested in slip-proof shoes for usage on the job.

I work as an admissions clerk at a small rural hospital. Being small and rural, you can actually get checked into the emergency room pretty quickly most of the time without being at risk of death. Genuinely, the majority of the time, patients get called back in under ten minutes, maybe fifteen tops if the nurses are wrapping something else up.

Unfortunately, the general attitude of a lot of the regulars is that the ER is for when you just want to pop in and out quickly, and they act like we’re trying to spite them when they do have a long wait. The truth is that we only have five standard rooms and two trauma rooms, and if someone is actively dying then all manpower goes to stopping that.

I was working one afternoon that was the rare occasion where seemingly everybody decided it was a good day to be sick. The ER was full enough that the nurses were triaging people and sending them back out to the waiting area. That’s when one of the regulars came up to the window, very obviously looking around at the very full waiting area. I started to register her, and during that process, she asked about the wait more than she answered any questions. When I tried to ask why she was seeing the ER, she instead pushed about how long the wait would be. I had a million other things to do, so I told her the next person in the queue had been there for over an hour.

At that point, she finally answered my question:

Regular: “Oh, well, in that case, I have chest pains.”

She stood there in absolutely no distress and frankly not even making a token effort to pretend like she wasn’t blatantly lying to get seen faster. Unfortunately, I can’t call people on stuff like that, so I just finished registering her. It’s also policy that we call the nurses any time someone states that they’re having chest pains. So, following policy, I called back and let them know our regular had stated she had chest pains after finding out there was over an hour’s wait.

[Regular] didn’t get brought back immediately, but the nurses were hustling to see to everybody, so she at least got called for triage after about fifteen or twenty minutes. The nurse obviously asked about the chest pains.

Regular: “Oh, my chest isn’t that bad. Actually, what’s really bothering me is my leg.”

Time to note that I’m calling her a regular because during this time she was there at least once a week about arthritis in that leg. We kind of already knew why she was there. Well, she got sent back out and got to spend more time in the waiting area.

Finally, she got into a room. Unfortunately, our most no-nonsense doctor was working that day, and everything had been relayed to him.

Doctor: “So, I see you’re having chest pains.”

She tried to go, “Well, actually…” again, but [Doctor] insisted that they had to treat the issue she was actually registered for and proceeded to do so.

He didn’t order any bill-padding tests, but he did enough to cover the hospital’s butt to be sure that there were no signs of cardiac or breathing issues. After [Regular] had spent a good amount of time stuck in the ER room, [Doctor] happily informed her that they hadn’t found any issues and she was free to go. Oh, and she could take some over-the-counter painkillers for her leg, and she should make a clinic appointment for long-term pain management — something she had been told before and would be covered by her insurance.

Here’s a small public service announcement because I’ve heard enough comments indicating this isn’t that well-known. The emergency room is for emergencies, but what that means is that the ER is just not set up for dealing with anything else. A better way to say it is that the ER is only equipped to deal with right-now issues. If you have high blood pressure or something, then the ER will happily get those readings back down to normal… for today. Making sure they stay down three days from now or next week is just not something the ER can help with.

And if you have some issue that just cannot be diagnosed within a few hours but is also not in any danger of killing you, well, the ER might not help you at all. Many an issue requires long-term monitoring or specialized tests, so you really need to get with a clinician for those things.

I just see people who waste weeks and weeks regularly coming to the ER and then leaving, complaining that they’re not getting the help they need. And they’re right, but it’s because we’re not the correct facility. There are genuinely things a clinician can do that the doctor in the ER can’t.

Campus parking passes at my college could be purchased for either one semester or a full year. One year, I originally intended to study abroad for the spring semester but ended up changing my mind late in the fall. I had a car on campus, and I couldn’t remember if I had bought only the one-semester pass or if I had played it safe and paid for the full year (knowing that study abroad wasn’t guaranteed and that the passes often sold out).

The first thing I did was check my student portal, which showed that my car was registered with the campus police but didn’t have anything about parking. Then, I did the somewhat obvious thing of checking my car windshield, and I realized there was a printed expiration date of May the following year. Awesome, I was all set.

Then, in mid-February, there was a severe blizzard. It started in the late afternoon, and alerts went out that all the cars on campus had to be moved to a specific emergency lot so that the smaller parking lots, dorm driveways, etc., could be plowed. The emergency lot was at the bottom of a hill, about a mile away from my dorm. I dutifully parked my car, walked a mile uphill in the snow for dinner at the dining hall, and hunkered down for the night.

The next afternoon, when the parking ban had been lifted and I went to retrieve my car, I found that I had three tickets. One was for displaying an expired parking pass, and two were for parking in the snow lots without a valid pass. The first of those identical tickets had been issued around 10:00 pm the previous night, and the second was around 7:00 that morning.

I went to the campus police department and showed the tickets to the woman at the front desk.

Me: “I don’t understand why it says my pass is expired. The expiration date is May of this year.”

Receptionist: “Yeah, but the sticker has a hole punch. That means it’s fall semester only.”

Me: “Wait, what?”

Receptionist: “Yeah, all of the tickets are printed with the same expiration date, but then we hole-punch the ones that are only good for the fall semester.”

Me: “That seems deliberately misleading. Where does it say that on the website?”

I pulled up the website on my phone. It was not explained on the basic “Parking Passes” page, and I knew it wasn’t on the student portal. But the receptionist had me click through to a different page, then go to a PDF, and then scroll past a whole bunch of regulations. The hole-punch system was explained there.

Me: “This is so unclear.”

Receptionist: “That’s just the system we use. You can submit a dispute if you want, but in the past, the system has always held up.”

Me: “Okay, but what about these other two tickets? I thought I had a valid pass because the language on the pass suggested I was fine. I made a good faith effort to comply with the parking restrictions.”

Receptionist: “It’s your responsibility to know that the pass is expired. Not having a valid pass is normally a Tier 1 ticket, but parking in the emergency lot without a valid pass is a Tier 3 ticket, which is also why you got two on consecutive days: because you didn’t move your vehicle after you got the first ticket.”

Me: “I didn’t get the first ticket until ten o’clock at night, and I got the second one first thing in the morning. You expected me to walk a mile… at night… in an active blizzard… just in case I had gotten a ticket? When I had no reason to believe I had done anything wrong?”

Receptionist: “Like I said, you can file a dispute if you want.”

So, that’s what I did. They ended up waiving only one of three tickets: the one that had been submitted at 7:00 am. I had to pay for the other two. Also, the spring semester parking passes had sold out, so I had to buy a town parking pass for almost three times as much.

Now, I live in a city with great public transportation, and any time I miss having a car, I remind myself of this story.

One morning, I decided that I really should go to the urgent care centre. It was a Thursday, I’d been feeling rough since Tuesday, and over the course of Wednesday, I’d almost completely lost my ability to swallow or speak due to pain. As I knew I couldn’t speak, I pre-typed a note on my phone with pertinent details: my name, my date of birth, the first line of address, information about my doctor’s surgery, a request for a vomit bowl (I was getting steadily more drooly), and a summary of my symptoms.

Silly me, I thought the receptionist would appreciate not having to interpret one or two words squeaks to get my information.

She did not. She huffed and puffed when she realised I wasn’t going to even try to speak in an understandable manner. Slowly, like she was speaking to a child, she informed me that a “sore throat” wasn’t a priority. And she tried to ignore me pointing to the stack of vomit bowls kept annoyingly out of reach of patients.

I was vindicated when I was seen by a nurse practitioner within five minutes of being triaged, and again when the receptionist had to pay for my taxi to Accident & Emergency out of petty cash because my “sore throat” needed treatment — and medications — that urgent care couldn’t offer.

Related:
A Most Unreceptive Receptionist, Part 20
A Most Unreceptive Receptionist, Part 19
A Most Unreceptive Receptionist, Part 18
A Most Unreceptive Receptionist, Part 17
A Most Unreceptive Receptionist, Part 16

I am currently at an unemployment office (Alfakassan in Sweden) to obtain a referral for a job I have lined up. Part of my application requires a full background check of three years, two of which can easily be filled with a reference from Alfakassan.

It’s important to note that before turning up, I corresponded with my former work coach and asked for this meeting, which they then approved, and they told me that they had all the relevant paperwork for my reference ready. Happy days! Or so I thought.

I turn up to the office at 1:40 pm and talk to the receptionist.

Me: “Hello. I have a meeting with [Work Coach] at 2:00 pm.”

Receptionist #1: “Okay, can I have your personal number?”

Me: “It’s [personal number].”

Receptionist #1: “It says on my computer that you stopped applying for unemployment since you were starting a new job.”

Me: “Yes, that’s why I’m here. I arranged a meeting with [Work Coach] to obtain a reference.”

Receptionist #1: “Oh, for that, you will need to fill out this form, then.”

She hands me a form before bluntly answering a phone at her desk, practically ushering me away to complete the form. Bear in mind that this is during the health crisis, so a lot of people are applying for unemployment. Most unemployment offices close at 6:00 pm, and the queue for the reception already wraps around the building. I decide to take the form, grab a coffee and a bun, and fill it out before rejoining the queue.

Forty minutes of queuing later, I finally get my turn at the reception, only this time there’s another person there. By the way, it’s now well past my meeting time with [Work Coach]. I have emailed them about the form and waiting in line, but they have so far not responded.

Me: “Hi. I was told I need to fill out this form, and I was meant to meet with [Work Coach] at 2:00 pm, but—”

Receptionist #2: “If you are late for your meeting, you will need to rebook for your unemployment.”

Me: *Starting to get a little bit agitated* “I’m not here for unemployment. I’m here for a reference, which was already agreed on between me and [Work Coach].”

Receptionist #2: “Oh. Have you filled out [exact same form I just mentioned I have already filled out]?”

Me: “Yes, it’s right here.”

Receptionist #2: “Okay, I will get in touch with [Work Coach], but you are in for a wait; they are going to be busy with other claimants. Next time arrive on time, okay?”

I let the last comment go and take a seat. The hours drag on.

And on.

And on.

At 5:20 pm, they start cutting the queue down to the immediate next ten claimants, as they will not be able to help anyone else that day. Since nobody has come to see me yet, I march over to the reception.

Me: “I’m sorry, I’ve been waiting in that seat for the last four hours to meet with [Work Coach] for a reference. What is going on?”

Receptionist #1: “Have you got an appointment?”

I am trying SO HARD not to raise my voice.

Me: “I did — at 2:00 pm. But I had to unexpectedly fill out this form you gave me for it!”

Receptionist #1: “Wait, you said you’re here for a reference?”

F****** SERIOUSLY?!

Me: “…Yes!”

She pulls a stack of paper from a small pile to her left and hands it to me.

Receptionist #1: “You could have just said that when you arrived.”

I wordlessly took the reference and stormed the f*** out of there. Over four hours wasted over nothing. No wonder people lie about their referrals.