We’d Help You But We’re All Out Of Time Turners

This happened about ten years ago back when I worked at my local hospital in the UK. I was one of the reception staff in a busy outpatients clinic.

A woman had just had a scan (I think it was either a CT or MRI), and she came in to book an appointment with her doctor for the results. The scan department had told her to book an appointment for about two weeks from then.

I looked up the clinic and offered her an appointment.

Me: “How about [date #1] at [time #1]?”

Woman: “I can’t make it then.”

Me: “Okay, how about [date #2] at [time #2]?”

Woman: “That’s not convenient for me, either.”

Me: “What about [date #3] at [time #3]?”

Woman: “That’s not good for me.”

I offered her appointments and she kept saying she was busy on that day — a holiday, something at her kid’s school, an appointment in another hospital, her cat was getting spayed, she would only see a consultant not a registrar, her car was getting waxed, her gerbil was getting married. Okay, that last one’s an exaggeration, but she had a reason to reject every single appointment.

By the time we reached an appointment that she could make, it was nearly eighteen weeks away!

She accepted the appointment and went on her merry way.

Not fifteen minutes later, an email came through from the hospital’s complaints department. The email was sent to me, my manager, the manager of the outpatient clinic, and a name I didn’t recognise. It turned out that as soon as the woman left the clinic, she went straight to the complaints department and complained that I had given her a clinic appointment in eighteen weeks’ time when she had specifically been told she needed an appointment in two weeks’ time.

She said that this was the one and only appointment I had offered her and that I had told her to take it or leave it. She insisted on being given an earlier appointment than the one she had been offered. The complaints department basically demanded that I explained why I had booked the woman’s appointment so far off.

I was like, “WTF?!” I figured that since Complaints wanted an explanation, I’d give them one.

I listed every single clinic appointment the woman had rejected and for what reason. There was a tally of the eighteen earlier appointments she had declined. I pointed out to Complaints that if the woman was able to clear her busy schedule on one of those days (perhaps spaying her cat could be rescheduled), then I would be more than happy to book her a clinic appointment in two weeks’ time like I had tried to not half an hour earlier.