#american health system
Now that I no longer work for the company, and knowing this doctor’s office doesn’t even work with any billing company anymore, I have a wild story to tell you all.
TLDR: I was trapped in a meeting for 16 hours at this rich guy’s house that had a bridge to a literal castle tower that he forced us to use anytime we wanted to go to the bathroom.
Some background if you aren’t in the US: most doctors offices outsource their billing to billing companies. The reason they do this is because medical billing laws are super complicated, even more so if they operate out of multiple states. It basically makes it impossible for them to do everything they need to do to keep their office seeing patients, so they outsource it. Most companies who don’t do this either have a bunch of illegal billing practices that are just waiting to be audited or worse, or they quickly shut down because it’s just too much. Some small practices might hire one or two people dedicated just to the billing side of things, but for most it’s just a mess.
We had this client who owned this really difficult doctors office. It was a specialty provider, and those can get really complicated across the board, so they tend to be real big messes no matter what because the billing rules are so complicated, and also the front office procedures are complicated, and front offices in general have high turnover so no one stays long enough to learn all the complicated bullshit.
But this also means the doctors are high maintenance, and the doctors and the guy who owned the practice didn’t even agree on what should be done and were constantly telling us totally opposite things. When we asked for clarification they’d ignore us only to scream at us later when we didn’t do it right.
The owner lives out in this richy rich suburb mansion neighborhood and he’s so proud of his house, he has his entire upstairs turned into an office. Keep in mind, this house is literally on the direct opposite side of the city from the actual doctors office, so he’s literally forcing all of his employees to travel an hour (without traffic, it would be way more with traffic) to work out of his upstairs in his house.
This also made it hard to know where we were supposed to meet this guy for meetings, because he insisted on meeting in person, and he hated our office, so he didn’t like meeting at our office (and I mean, one of our offices was super weirdly set up and we hated that one too, and the other was in downtown in a not great area, I don’t really blame him that much on that one).
So he’d say “meet me at our office at 9am” and we’d show up to the doctors office (which also had meeting rooms….multiple meeting rooms…so it’s not like it was illogical to assume by office he meant the actual office the doctors worked out of). Then we’d get told “what are you doing here? They’re expecting you at their office. Their HOUSE office. On the other side of the city.”
So, we’d be late. and they’d scream at us over it. Then when we started trying to clarify beforehand, they still would change it last minute and not tell us so we’d show up and get the whole scream fest all over again.
Well, this owner decides we need to flesh out all of the rules and procedures. This included their front office, because we were taking some of the phone calls to lighten their load. So they ask us to come up to their house. This was supposed to take at max 2 hours.
16 hours
It took. fucking. 16 hours.
And that’s just when I left. When I left, more of the VP management team is coming in to continue. They didn’t get out of that meeting until 1 am.
As a result of being in this dumb house for so long, I got intimately familiar with it
This house was designed like an Italian villa. Why did anyone need an Italian villa in the middle of fucking nowhere? No one knows. I’ll say, though, it was very pretty. It had massive, intricately carved double front doors, with roman-style fountains on either side of it. When you walked in, you walked into a wine cellar. These people didn’t even drink, so it was empty, but they were proud to own a wine cellar nonetheless.
They had a theater room. One entire wall was the screen, and the seating was comfy theater-style chairs at like. the really nice theaters with the reclining seats (idk if that’s just in the US or elsewhere, but our theaters have that). This is the only thing in this house that if I was rich…yeah, I’d probably have that.
Their upstairs though. That’s. that’s where it gets just. absolutely ridiculous.
Their entire upstairs…wrapping around it is a balcony. just. one, massive balcony that just. continually wraps around the entire upstairs like it’s embracing the upper end of the house.
They had a big ass pool table that converted into a meeting table. which. cool. I guess. I don’t think they played pool, though.
Then. Then my friends. There was the bridge.
They had a castle tower. A castle tower. Why did they need a castle tower that wasn’t connected to their house? Who knows. The only way to get to this castle tower was a bridge. My friend calls it the “Bridge of Khazad Dum” from LOTR, you know, the one where the balrog shows up and Gandalf is like YOU SHALL NOT PASS!!!!
Except…this guy was obsessed with his bridge and would not shut up about it. I guess if you wanted to have a bridge, you could do some pretty cool things with a bridge in your house leading out to a castle tower. Like if you’re rich. Just go full castle dungeon boss and put in a moat underneath it
Or you could be a tad bit more classy, since this is a desert and water is kinda scarce, and put like some natural desert brush. Something that’ll be really pretty to look at. His house was surrounded by it, it wouldn’t have been hard.
No.
The bridge was just. over their dumb, ugly driveway. A driveway. A cement drive way. Not even like. pretty cobblestones or something. Anything would be better than ugly cement.
And he was still so proud of this dumbass bridge over ugly as hell boring pavement and unlike Gandalf, this guy was like “you may ONLY use this bridge.”
If you had to take a call, he wanted you to go stand outside on the bridge. Not the rest of the wrap around balcony, which was closer (we literally had a door leading out to the balcony right next to the pool meeting table, the bridge door was a walk to the complete other side of the room). You had to do it on the bridge.
If you had to go to the bathroom (which I unfortunately have to do a lot), you couldn’t use the bathroom that was in the same meeting room as us.
No.
You had to go past the nearby bathroom and go across the bridge to the castle tower, where you then opened that up to a living room/kitchen area, then through another door to the guest bedroom, then through another door to the bathroom
and because I had to go to the bathroom more than most people, I naturally didn’t assume this guy was crazy enough to make someone do that.
No.
He chewed me out for daring to use the bathroom closest to us, said I wasn’t allowed to use that one, and that he wanted us to use the one in the dumb ass tower.
I crossed that dumb bridge way too many times than I’d like to have as a result
some other side shitty things at this house:
1. He had cameras everywhere. okay. Sure. that’s pretty normal these days, what with ring doorbells or whatever. But one of his employees hit our CEO’s car. And in the middle of our meeting this asshole would pull up the footage of the car getting hit to show his other employees and laugh. Like. right in front of our CEO. I was flabbergasted that this guy thought it was fine to laugh about his car getting hit right in front of him when we were already in a meeting to fix his practice that had gone way over the max time limit.
2. There was no cell service. Or, it was very spotty, depending on your plan. So you really did feel trapped there. I had another appointment after work that day and I couldn’t call them to let them know I had to cancel as a result.
3. His kids. omg. They wouldn’t stop coming to interrupt over…I mean normal kid stuff, but these kids were just. totally oblivious to this stupid long meeting that was happening in their home, and the parents (because the mom was also involved in this) would stop everything to do stuff with them. Which, sure, you should give your kids attention when needed, but you’d also think that when kids come home and start needing things, that would be a good time to be like “let’s pick this up tomorrow.” Not these people.
4. At one point they also were talking about how they were sending their daughter to a summer camp. cool. whatever. Except…this summer camp? It wasn’t actually a camp. It was a week stay at a 5 star Marriot Resort. Apparently, according to them, any other type of camping was just “homeless sleeping.”
So, from then on, whenever someone asks me to do something and says “I’m sorry, this meeting might be really tedious/awkward” I look them in the eye and I go, “Will you keep me trapped at a bridge house for over 16 hours? No? Then I’m not worried at all.”
that feeling when you get kicked off of your parent’s insurance for the sin of turning 26 so you have to buy new insurance but literally no insurance provided by your pcp will cover your birth control so you have to pay for it out of pocket, which with your parent’s insurance was only $15 for a three month supply, but now with this new insurance it’s over $800 but you don’t find that out until you get to the pharmacy so naturally you break down crying right here in the CVS with a line of people behind you and you can’t even complain about it because if you even imply that you wish we had free healthcare you get labeled a fucking communist.
~*~✨ Just American Things ✨~*~
