Less than Competent

I had two examples of this over the weekend.

The first occurred when I got home on Friday. There was a bill for the medical procedure that I had back at the end of January. The first charge was for the biopsy of the wart. The second charge was for the follow up visit with the doctor which was in March.

The total was $367. My part of the bill was $367. There was a small little problem the bill had not been submitted to the insurance company. Further I’d received a bill a month early with a charge dated for . I don’t understand why the charge from the end of January wasn’t on that bill.

I made a quick call to the medical provider. I was told that bill hadn’t been submitted to the insurance company. My question was why hadn’t that happened. A month earlier I’d gotten a bill which had been sent to my insurance company why hadn’t this one. Well I was told perhaps they didn’t take my insurance information. I can’t say what happened on the first charge but the second charge was for the follow up at the doctor’s. They certainly had my insurance information. Now the doctor’s office obviously doesn’t do the billing. That is done at a central location but the question remains how did they not have this information. So I had to give the representative on the phone my insurance member number. I then had to give her the address of where to send the claim to. I can understand giving the member number but they don’t even have the address to send a claim.

These are the same incredibly competent people that called me the day before the procedure at home to tell me how much I needed to pay for the procedure. They had two other numbers to reach me, my work phone and my cell, and didn’t try either one. These are also the same people that took the name and phone number of the friend who was going to pick me up after the procedure. I ended up having to call him to pick me up because no one in the office had bothered to call him. If they weren’t going to call him why ask for his name and phone number. Also if they weren’t going to call him why didn’t they tell me that.

The medical care is first rate; the administrative end is well less than competent.

The second example of less than competent came from Earthlink. That's my e-mail service provider. I have to say I'm getting a little tired of them. And what happened on Saturday is only reinforcing the feeling.

I received an e-mail message from Earthlink on Sunday morning. In it they stated that The following message(s) from members on your block list were deleted. There were nine messages deleted (a couple were from the same person). The problem was none of them were on my blocked domain list.

I called them and talked to "Susie" who sounded all the world like she was Indian and I mean as from the country of India. Susie said that if there wasn't an IP address associated with the e-mail then it would be blocked. It didn't make any difference if I'd received e-mail from them in the past. The problem I have with that explanation is there were nine messages in all from 7 different people. How could all of them not have IP addresses associated with the e-mail?

I was then told I needed to forward the message to another part of Earthlink. I said I think she could do that. Supposedly in the next day or so to let me know what's going on.

Once again less than competent.

But to show not everyone is like that these days here's another story with a different ending.

I canceled my Freecreditscore account. You can only do this by calling them. I thought great I'll get a hard sales pitch to stay. But nothing like that happened. I got an automated menu. I pressed a number on the phone for billing. I pressed another number to cancel my subscription. Done. A little later in the day I got a confirmation e-mail saying my account had been canceled. It couldn't have been any easier.