Work was crap again today.

A big part of my job is making sure patients are making their payments in a timely manner. Occasionally that means I have to make a collection call. Today, I made a collection call for an 8.00 bill that was over a year old. This bill was for a child, so I needed to speak with the parents. I get the mother on the line and ask her when we can expect to receive payment. SHE. GOES. NUTS.

She starts yelling at me telling me that she paid her bill and that was it. I asked if she had been receiving the bills we had been sending for the past 10 months. She said yes, but she ignored them because she assumed it was an error on our part. So she goes on and says that we are an unethical company for sending a bill and then a couple of months later sending another bill. I tried to explain to her that nowhere on our bills does it says it is a final bill. Furthermore, she received an Explanation of Benefits from her insurance company telling her she owed the amount. She told me I should have called her to tell her the second bill was coming.

To that I said..."I send out 3000 bills every month. I cannot call every person who is going to get a bill to tell them a bill is coming."

Whatever I said, this woman had an argument. She would not listen to a thing I had to say. I started to say that as a good business practice, we would write off the 8.00 for her. She wouldn't listen to that either. So my office manager gets on the phone and tells this woman the exact same thing I had been telling her. Woman would not listen to her either. My office manager basically starts her old-school collector tactics on this woman and tells her it's her responsibility to check on her bills, not ours.

We are not writing off this 8.00. It sucks that I might have to send someone to collection for that small of an amount, but sometimes it's not really about the money, it's about the principle.

Anyway, that was my big excitement for the day. Glad tomorrow is Friday.