Last Updated on: 16th November 2019, 01:14 pm
I should start off by saying that no, I didn’t have a bad experience at the walk-in clinic today, in fact it was pretty great from a blind dude needing customer service perspective. Everybody I dealt with was nice and helpful, so thank you, Campus Estates. I’m glad I can say that, because if I had met up with the wrong end of a policy you seem to have, this post and the rant I likely would have unleashed in the building wouldn’t be so nice.
If you’re following the still kind of shiny new Twitters, you may know that I’ve been having some problems with my left eye. I got an eyelash in it the other day and it hasn’t been the same since. At first I thought it was something that was going to take care of itself, but yesterday evening pretty much punched me in the face while screaming otherwise, so off to the clinic I went this morning. $40 plus on cabs and $30 worth of eye drops that weren’t covered by my benefits later, I’m back home with some drops to take care of what they say is a simple little infection. Yay, I like simple. Simple is good.
But moving on, it’s the $40 plus worth of cabs that I’d like to focus on here.
When looking up what we have for walk-in clinics in Guelph (it sure didn’t take long since there aren’t many of them), I saw a note in the listing for the only one in town that’s open during the day that said “Please note: these hours depend on patient volume and doctor availability and are subject to change without notice.” Without notice? Hmm, that’s not good. I need to cab there because I’m not overly familiar with the area and even if I was, my eye was causing a distraction to the point that I’m not sure I’d feel completely comfortable walking and taking buses. I am however familiar enough with the area to know that getting from where I am to where the eye drops are via taxi ain’t gonna be cheap. So I did the logical thing and called the phone number that was listed. I was greeted by a recorded message saying pretty much the same thing that the website had told me, basically that if they felt like it, they’d shut the place down. Conveniently, there was no way to speak to a human or even to leave a message. In a sense I totally get that because you don’t need everybody and his brother calling you to ask about itchy asses and genital deformities, but it would have been nice to know that I wasn’t about to spend a pile of money for no reason.
Thankfully I took my chances and was rewarded by an open clinic and quick service, but the fact that I might not have been so lucky and there would be nothing I could do about it is just plain wrong. There’s no way I’m the only person who would be cabbing there, and I’d love to know how many people have been screwed over by this without notice stuff. If I had been I’d be raising hell to anybody I could find until I got my wasted $40 back, but a lot of people aren’t me and would probably just shut up and take it.
This is one policy that needs changing for the sake of doing right by people, or at the very least if the volume of patients doesn’t justify keeping the joint running, change the recording on the machine to reflect that so we’d know when we called that there’s no point in making the trip. Doesn’t seem to me that this would be all that hard, and I hope you’ll consider it. It would be the nice, fair and proper thing to do.