Month: 29 Heshvan 5766 (December 2005)

I just got a call from someone who tried to appeal a rejected claim that isn’t even in the system.
In other words, they’re putting the cart before the horse, (or the reindeer before the slay for all you Christmas enthusiasts).
Then, I was told how to do my job, and that there doesn’t need to be a claim in the system in order to make an appeal.
If this is the kind of Christmas cheer I have to deal with, then I’d gladly wipe Christmas and everything associated with it off the calendrical map.
I’m so tired of the commercialism, the greed, and the ideals that are hopelessly held up as the standard when no one even comes close to making it that far.
This is supposed to be the “most wonderful time of the year” for all the Goyim, and most of you make it the worst time of the year for folks like me who are stuck on the phones dealing with the crap, while being told by my employer to make sure you can hear my smile.
I promise, there is no smile to be heard.
To all the sincere Goyim, (and there are some), I commend you for your sincerity and kindness throughout this time when your peers make it exceedingly difficult on everyone.
I wish you a very merry Christmas, and hope your celebration of your savior’s birth is very meaningful.
But to the rest, please don’t spread any more of your Christmas cheer.
We’re only a week into the holiday season, and I’m already sick of the havoc you always manage to wreak on society.

Taken from customerservant.com

I guess today is just not my day.
I went to open a bottle of water because I was thirsty, and the damn thing exploded.
Exploded!
How the hell does a water bottle explode?
I really hope the rest of the day isn’t like this.

Taken from customerservant.com

We had another team meeting today.
We got new (or at least passed-off-as-new) information from the client.
It’s official: We’re not allowed to transfer a helpdesk call to the helpdesk.
Any helpdesk calls we get we have to handle, and that includes the groups we don’t service for members but do for pharmacies.
Project merging is in the air.
I took the test today to finish the application for the support team.
I had to bring the craptop (that’s the nickname I’ve given my five-year-old laptop) to work in order to take it because I don’t have write permissions on any drives anymore.
The test itself wasn’t hard, but figuring out which terms to search for in ORMess was.
I really wish they’d employ a more robust search tool.
It would make life easier.
But then, that’s me thinking logically again, and we just can’t have that, now can we?

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When members call in, we ask for their ID.
Sometimes, instead of giving the ID, they go “The prescription number iss … ” or whatever number they happen to have.
They don’t warn us, and we have to jump to different parts of the screen to search depending on what information we’re given.
A little warning would be nice!

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As stated here, the caller told me the prescription had been called in on the twenty-fifth, which would put it at a perfectly normal processing rate.
When she got on the phone with my supervisor, (actually the Asc member taking supervisor calls), she said that it had been called in on the twenty-third.
How about you get your story right!
I’ll be the first one to admit when I’ve made a mistake, but there’s nothing I hate more than a caller who just wants to get me in trouble because they don’t like what I have to tell them.
She should have given me all the information in the first place.
I could have helped a little more then.
Now, I told her we wouldn’t wave the expedition fee, and then she gets to a supervisor, provides the rest of the details, and gets the fee waved, making me look like a total ass.

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I just got done taking a call from a woman who had to be half-baked.
She was completely confused, babbling on about wanting this particular manufacturer’s brand of Hydrocodone, and how she had to have all these special numbers on the back of her prescriptions in order to send them in, and how she was going to find the person who gave her misinformation.
FYI: Members can’t choose the manufacturer of a drug.
It’s not like going to the grocery store and picking up your favorite brand or something.
And why does someone need to take three different strengths of a narcodic like that, along with Alprazolam (the generic for Zanax)?
Really scary.

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I got to work this morning, and found that they had turned the heat off last night.
I’m not kidding around.
They actually turned the heat off, and it’s still in the 20’s.
The people who worked the overnight shift litterally had to wear gloves to type.
John says he put in four service requests to have the heat turned on, and one to turn the air on when it gets to eight thousand degrees in here.
I can’t believe it’s really that hard to keep the temperature somewhere near normal.
Idiocy at work.
They released the new upgrade to the database interface today.
I’ve been instructed to use the old link, (which is running very slow today), until the client’s minion comes out, declares that the new version is accessible, and tells me to try out the client’s latest attempt at bestowing a gift on creation.
I get to be the guinney pig again, and that’s a direct quote from John.
I hate being in this positiion.
Why do I always have to be the guinney pig in these situations?
I know I’m the only one who uses a screen reader around here, but it feels like I’m the company’s experiment or something.
“Let’s set up some obstacles, and see if the blind person can make it work!”
Or is it just extreme ignorance.
Who knows.
I didn’t get the support position, or the supervisor position, so I’ll be on the phones a while longer.
There’s got to be a way out of here.
In the meantime, I’ll settle for a little heat.

Taken from customerservant.com

I got in this morning to find that the link I use to access the database interface has been killed, and to top it off, the new interface doesn’t work with Jaws.
This is exactly what I thought was going to happen.
And as if things need to be any worse, the person who has all the information about who to contact in order to get the link operative again has been fired.
She wasn’t forward-thinking enough to pass on the information.
Probably wanted to keep it to herself so she could feel important.
There’s the client’s man, who’s perfectly happy to accept the declaration of accessibility handed down from the developers, and then there’s the HTML Specialist, (yes, that’s her actual title), who’s in his pocket, so the results will be pretty much the same from that end.
This is what happens when idiots get put in to positions of power.
We’ve gone through this before, I’ve made it a point to make suggestions and recommendations to the developers to make the damn thing accessible, and no one seems to listen.
Now we get to spend however long arguing this point all over again.
Well, at least this time, I have ‘net access.
I’m not too thrilled about sitting around here serfing the ‘net though.
That’s not why I’m supposed to be here.
I didn’t get up, find out that the conditioner I bought isn’t really conditioner, (not Andrew’s fault, probably some idiot put shampoo in the same place as the conditioner, and he just grabbed because he knows where the conditioner is supposed to be, and assumed that it would be there), then to spend most of the remaining time trying to get a comb and brush through my hair without doing any damage, just to come to work and find out that everything’s been totally screwed up because of someone else’s stupidity.
Why does stupidity have to ruin everything?
I’d love to find a way to make stupidity illegal.
To be fair, I realize that making changes to tons of code is very expensive, and that there are only two employees who require the changes.
But I don’t think it would require a complete overhaul of the system to make it accessible.
Java can be made accessible, it just takes a little consideration to do it.
Given my past dealings, the impression I get is that accessibility really isn’t a concern for more than financial reasons, and they’ll just continue to feed me lines because they think I’ll believe them, and because I really have no choice but to at least act like I do.
What else am I supposed to do?
It’s not like I can just expose some major scam and get the changes made.
If I go making too many waves, it could cost me my job, and I’m sure there’s something they could hide behind to make sure it doesn’t look like a discrimination case.
I’m definitely a proponent of capitalism, but there’s making a profit, and then there’s greed.
Based on what I’ve seen, I firmly believe that both the client and the company I work for are acting as a result of the latter, and not the former.
I wish I was wrong on this one.
The Business Of America Is Business,

TMH’s Bacon Bits, Liberal Common Sense, the Conservative Cat, and MacStansbury.org link to this.

Convergys, accessibility, Express Scripts, computer, MYSQL, database

Taken from customerservant.com

I’ve been informed by the acting operations manager for all projects that the client’s man isn’t in the building.
The HTML Specialist is supposed to be contacting.
We’ll have some information at a quarter after never this afternoon.

Taken from customerservant.com

I just talked to one of the techno-shepherds, and he told me that the client wants me to use the lates version of the screen reader so that my “testing environment” is the same as theirs.
I’ve already explained several times that the Java support hasn’t changed from V5 (the version I’m using) to V7.
All they did as far as internet applications is concerned was add support for Firefox.
They added some other Jaws-specific features, but no change in Java support.
And what the hell is this about a “testing environment?”
Yet another line of crap.
I was just given a link that goes to “the page cannot be displayed.”
We’ll probably have this thing figured out by the end of the month, just in time for them to break it again.

Taken from customerservant.com