"My God, they're everywhere. Surely there's a medical cure someplace."
One of the distinct advantages of being gay is not having to put up with overbearing, bitchy women who are totally convinced that they are the center of the universe and have absolute power. How these people ever trap some dumb-ass straight guy into marrying them is beyond me. I used to work with office managers at medical offices, a field where this type of women are specifically concentrated. In the old days, here's how it worked:
The office manager doesn't like something...maybe a feature of the software, maybe the way a support call was handled by one of my guys, maybe the temperature outside or something equally unrelated to what my company did. The issue doesn't matter. Whatever the issue is, it always goes down the same way.
Belligerent office manager calls and gripes her head off. I am given an ultimatum to solve whatever the problem is or else. If I don''t solve it, the next call is from the Doctor himself, who knows nothing about anything except that his office manager is whining. That's the problem he expects to be solved and he doesn't give a damn about the details.
Sometimes, there was an actual problem or issue that I could resolve, in which case all was well. But many times, the issues were not issues within my purview. I cannot correct the temperature outside. I could not make an insurance company pay a healthcare claim when the staff uses incorrect diagnosis codes or got the patient's date of birth wrong. The office manager can bitch until her eyes pop out of her head, and it isn't going to change a thing.
I was sitting through one such ass chewing someplace in Texas, and the doctor was sitting there too. The complaint was so far outside my realm of influence I thought the scene was funny. I wanted to ask the office manager if she needed to clear out some space in her office so she could lay down on the floor and kick and scream. "If I have to endure this tantrum, I at least want to see you turn red."
I never really did learn to handle these situations very well. You can't reason with people like this. You can't solve their problems. You can't really tell them to fuck off (although I ended up doing that a couple of times, and I did learn to avoid them on the marketing end of the company). They are just frustrating people - the downside of an otherwise fairly rewarding industry.
Fortunately, and very much for the record, not all office managers in medical offices are this way, and not all women behave this way. But the ones that do are hopelessly unreasonable and maddeningly frustrating. Usually they are totally incompetent and specifically in medical practices, a lot of them are also stealing their doctors blind.
It has been a very long time since I felt the frustration of dealing with one of this breed. Until Today, that is. I got cross threaded with one of them in the aviation industry in Florida. She sent me an email this morning asking about some bullshit part they returned three weeks ago, and whether I'd written the $500 refund check yet. I didn't get back to her soon enough, so she called, and insisted that I be interrupted during a meeting with our bank.
All I had to say was, "Yes, darling, your refund is being processed as we speak, and I promise it will be mailed Monday or heads will roll. After all, you are the center of the universe, and your refund is infinitely more important than anything else on my desk, and the last thing I want to do is offend you."
Gag me with a fork. Despite my training, which kicked in spontaneously, I just couldn't do it. Especially when we returned a part to them in July, 2010 that they didn't refund, but carried as a credit on their books. What a bitch. I won't say she's the only one in the aviation world, but they are a lot fewer and farther between then then they are in healthcare.
So instead of handling the afore mentioned feminazi bitch with the grace and professionalism I learned in the software business, she got my goat. What can I say?