After posting several articles about positivity I have to break my record with a rant. This week I had a chain of events that sent me into deep depression. Thursday, Lovely and I left the house at 8:00 am to make it in time for her doctors’s visit at 9:30, we arrived at 10:00 a.m. Traffic going into downtown Chicago was dense. We checked in and waited for Lovely to be called. They called her at ten-thirty. I sat in the exterior waiting area reading. She eventually made it into the doctor’s office at 12:30 p.m. Luckily, I had a very boring book to keep me occupied. I knew there was trouble when Lovely exited with the doctor at her side. Evidently, the doctor could not assess her condition because the blood test results never made it to her. Lovely had her blood drawn three weeks ahead of the appointment. The story gets better. The doctor ordered another test for Lovely. This test could be done right next door at Stroger Hospital which is physically connected to Cook County Health. It sounded like a solid plan, we would make the appointment with the lab before we left to go home. We walked five hundred feet North then turned West and walked another five hundred feet passing clinic after clinic to the hospital main entrance where we got an elevator to the second floor. We turned left (by this time I lost my sense of direction) and walked the beige colored hallway passing clinic after clinic until reaching Clinic-M, Radiology. Except, the scheduler for Clinic-M was not available. We waited for another half an hour before an attendant appeared and gave us a number to call. Frustrated and beaten we decided to leave. Finally, we were on our way home. We arrived at our door at 3:30 p.m.
After a snack and a brief rest, I dialed the number to reach Clinic-M to make the appointment. The phone rang off the hook without an answer, and I gave up.
Today, Lovely asked me to take her to Quest Diagnostics, a national testing service, to find the missing blood test. The lobby was a baren room with a two people waiting, a standing computer screen, and a door. I began pumping our information into the computer when the door opened and a tech appeared. Lovely immediately corralled the attendant asked if she could give her the results of her blood test. ” We don’t deal in results here all we do is take blood. You have to go online.” Well, that triggered my blood to boil.
Lovely and I sat in the car as I dialed the number they gave us to call for results. After ringing several times a male robot answered and began spouting numbers to dial for specific situations. None of them sounded like what we needed, so I pushed the last number he listed. Another male robot answered and started the same spiel. The situations he rolled off sounded very much like the last ones. I pushed number eight this time and waited for something to happen. A third robot replied and began telling me to push button numbers assigned to my situation, except there was no button for getting test results. By this time fifteen minutes had passed and the car was getting hot so I ended the game. It was time for me to bite the bullet and use their website.
At my desk, I went directly to the Quest Diagnostics website and learned that I must set up an account to get any information. I did. I finally pushed the button to verify my information. A note appeared that I needed to get a code sent via text to complete the job. I did. The code came slowly, but it finally arrived.
I punched in the code, and another note page arrived with a paragraph of malarky about needing more information. This time, they wanted pictures of a photo ID and a passport. All I had to do was take a picture of the QR code at the corner of the screen. I took the pictures, but began wondering how they would move from my phone into the database on my computer. I hit enter on the phone and the same program I used on the desk top appeared on my phone. They wanted all the information that I just pumped into my computer into their website except now they wanted it to come through my phone. If I owned a gun I would have shot the desk top computer and my phone too.
There was a hidden clue at the bottom of the website page. It was a line of Chinese. I maintain that all of this Artificial Intelligence (AI) should be renamed Artificial Un-Intelligence. I’m taking a break for a beer.
The most stupid person I ever met was a genius compared to these AI robots.
Filed under: Aging, Biography, health care | Tagged: AI, computer rage | 1 Comment »
