Eyeroll moment of the day...

[MarmaladeSideDown]

I'm sitting here at home and the landline rang but stopped before I got to it, so I dialled 1471 to find out who it could be (family members often call it as my mobile reception here is rubbish). It was a local number and seemed slightly familiar to me, so I searched online and discovered it was my GP surgery, so I rang them to find out what they wanted.

The receptionist answered saying how could she help so I explained about the missed call. "Well it wasn't me", she said. Oh right, I thought. Here we go.

She then asked for my name and I said that DH and I both lived here and gave her my name and his. "Well, no-one has called you" she said so I suggested that perhaps the call was for DH. He has a hospital appointment tomorrow for investigation into an ongoing condition, so I wondered if it might be about that, but since he isn't here at the moment I thought I'd better find out in case he needs to contact them. "Well I'm sorry" says she in a very officious voice. "I can't give you any information about anyone else". I pointed out that it was they who had rung first, and I was just trying to be helpful in calling them back in case it was urgent. Not good enough apparently, and she refused point blank to even tell me whether it was him they were trying to contact.

What a pointless waste of my time that was.

Has anyone else felt themselves rolling their eyes out loud at the brick wall of officialdom today?

And yet if you need an appointment but can’t ring yourself, they expect someone else to do it fir you and for them to be aware of the exact symptoms you have etc….

@newtlover politeness goes a long way though. There is no need to snotty about someone ringing back or to make things more difficult than they need to be.
The OP isn’t complaining about them not telling her (as she actually explained too) but about their manners.

Yes, I'm well aware of patient confidentiality, but this was ridiculous. I also know he doesn't have an appointment there, it is at the hospital. Tomorrow. We are both of retirement age, and there's only the two of us living here. If, as she so eloquently stated, nobody had rung to speak to me, it doesn't exactly take Einstein to guess who they were actually phoning, does it? I wasn't expecting her to tell me what they wanted to speak to him about, but it would have been nice if she had said something along the lines of yes, the surgery did call, and no, it wasn't for you. I would have then been able to tell her that they could call DH on his mobile, as he was not at home. It has happened before without issue, and I have then texted DH to tell him to call them, but this time she was determined to take being obstreperous to an Olympic level.

YABU
of course she couldn't give you any information about another person even your DH, it's confidential.
Sounds like she did her best dropping a heavy hint that it was about DH so he could call back .....

I kept getting emails for my now adult son for a series of hospital appointments because my email address had got attached to his patient record from when he was a child. I tried to get it changed numerous times, he tried to get it changed numerous times, but the hospital said it was the GP’s problem and the GPs said it was the hospital’s problem.
i ended up having to submit a full on formal complaint about the GDPR breach and it eventually got sorted.
Luckily, my son’s appointments weren’t for a medical matter that he wanted to keep
private.

Oh I’ve wanted to take an appointment with the access nurse/nurse practitioner.
No appointment

Rang again and discussion starts on how there was no point fur me to see the nurse because I’ll need a new medication (I was having side effects).
But when I rang before reception was happy to book me in with her? Who am I supposed to see?
Grumble grumble (them!) Lots of confusion to finally tell me I was wrong but it was ok for me to see the nurse practitioner 😁😁. Still no appointment.

Rang again. Still no appointment but this time the person decided she needed to refer me to out of hours. Booked a nurse appointment with explanations.

Arrived for the appointment and was told they rescheduled it because …. I needed to see a GP, Not the nurse.

I only had to wait 15 mins and I was very grateful they rearranged everything.
I still dint know who I was supposed to see 🙄🙄

YABVU.

This is Chat not AIBU…..
As the OP reminded everyone in the first two posts…..

I spent all day today planning for an important teams call. I gathered figures, analysis, graphs.

Call came and went, two senior directors spent the entire hour talking over each other and ignoring me and my counterpart who messaged me and asked if I had done Wordle today in the chat where they could see it but neither one read it

You do seem to get an awful lot of these annoying phone calls. I'm in my 70s and it has never happened to me, I wonder what you are doing wrong or I am doing right?

One of the previous tenants of our flat keeps taking out credit cards registered at our address, running up large bills, and then defaulting on all the payments. In the end so much post had come for him that the landlord asked us to open a few and check they weren't anything important. I called the credit card companies to make them aware that he hasnt lived here for almost 4 years, 3 of the companies took my calls and de-registered our address but one wouldn't even speak to me because I wasn't the person named on the account. I kept trying to explain that I can prove that he hasn't lived here for almost 4 years but is running up thousands of pounds worth of debt registered to our address and the man on the other end of the phone couldn't care less. I understand GDPR etc but come on, at least let me prove that he doesn't live here and then call him?!

I had a call from the GP receptionist asking me to book blood tests for a medication that I am no longer on.

She just couldn't/wouldn't understand me and insisted that I needed an appointment. So I booked one.

The nurse didn't take my blood as I didn't need a test. Wasted an appointment.

We had a new Talk-Talk router sent to our address but for a different name. I tried to be helpful and call to say it had been misdelivered and that the chap had given the wrong address - then started the most ridiculous saga.

They wouldn't accept that he didn't live at my address, kept saying they would tell the delivery company about the mistake (it wasn't a mistake in the delivery obviously!) and wouldn't let me prove my ownership of the address and therefore remove it from his account. Wanted me to pay the postage to return the router. I ended up selling it on eBay!

This is Chat, not AIBU and it isn't about me wanting to know about confidential information, it was me expecting a doctor's receptionist to break the habit of a lifetime and be polite.

Thank you.😂😂😂

Gosh. Such a charmed life you lead.

That is some special kind of stupid !

I took my cat on holiday with me , he decided it'd be a good idea to eat some soap ! So I took him to a local vet to get him checked over.
I gave them my name, hotel and home address, his normal vets number and address.
They said leave him there for a few hrs just so they could keep a eye on him ( he seemed absolutely fine)
Two hrs later I go back to pick him up .
Receptionist ( a different one than when I dropped him off ) I asked for him with his and my name.

Nope no cat of that name there
I said he's not actually registered there he's on holiday.
Nope still no cat of that name or my name .
I described him , skinny black and white neutered male
Nope
I brought him in because he ate soap
Nope
He came in a two tone grey hard plastic carrier .
Nope
He is aggressive. ( i had warned them )
Nope
He is registered at x vet
Nope
I am starting to get seriously worried by now
I moved away from the counter to see if I could find a decent video of him on my phone and so others could get served.
Receptionist snapped at me saying "you need to pay the bill before you leave"
I am getting pissed off now so snapped back , if you have a bill you must have a name '
She said that until I could remember my cats name she couldn't provide a bill.
Two other people in the waiting room burst out laughing at the idiocy.

So she went back through the records of today's patients and I showed her a video of him .

She says ooh this might be him, we have only had 3 black and white cats in today .

They had mis-spelt my name missing the 1st letter of my very normal 6 letter English name.
My cat is named after a well know chocolate biscuit , they named him after a different chocolate biscuit

£80 lighter and considerably pissed off I got him back.

@ScottBakula Your tale reminds me of a conversation I regularly have with a well-known cough UPS cough courier about the VAT on goods we import from overseas suppliers. They regularly omit to send us the VAT and duty bill, and frequently send it to the wrong firm entirely.

I contact them with the tracking number and provide them with a scan of the actual tracking label on the box we received, addressed to us. Could they email me the invoice please. No, not unless I can answer some security questions.

Okay, hit me with the questions. They want the name and address of the people it was erroneously addressed to, the invoice number and the total amount. I tell them that I can't provide them with any of that information because it is on the invoice and we haven't received it. Hence me asking for a copy of it. Oh no, they say, we can't send it to you. Doh.

I finally got an invoice out of them just last week for a query I've been chasing since January. I wouldn't mind, but WE owe THEM the money!

A few years ago DM passed away. I was on her phone a few weeks after her funeral, just looking through her photos etc when she received a call.

It was virgin media, asking if they could speak to her.

Me: I'm sorry, she's passed away.
VM: Will she be back later?
Me: ...No. She's passed away. She's died.
VM: We do need to speak to her urgently about her account.
Me: I closed her account myself because she died.
VM: You would need her permission to do that. Could we make an appointment to call her tomorrow?
Me: No.
VM: Okay, how about next week?
Me: No, I'm pretty certain she'll still be dead next week!

I'm not sure if there was a problem with the line and they couldn't hear me properly, but after that I heard a small gasp, a muffled "very sorry for your loss" and not long after an email came through on her phone to say her account was closed and they were sorry for the bereavement 🙃

Dear people who don't understand medical privacy and GDPR: your GP can't talk to you about your spouse without your spouse's express consent. Yes, even about something as trivial as having just phoned your spouse or there being a prescription to collect. They are not being jobsworths. They are protecting the privacy of their patients.

Was the caller a native English speaker? If they weren't, they might not have understood the euphemism "passed away".

The point is they shouldn’t be surprised/rude if people follow up on a missed call. No one commenting thinks they should break confidentiality policies.

Dear poster, I know all that, you are confusing me with someone who's stupid. The organisation I work for is positively stiff with high security measures and I am high-level MOD security checked. I wasn't speaking to the GP (fat sodding chance of that round here). I was merely enquiring of the receptionist whether they had telephoned our number, and whether it was me they were trying to contact. Since it was confirmed that it wasn't me they were calling, it was blindingly obvious who else they were calling. Once that was resolved, all I was wondering was whether I should tell them to call DH's mobile number if they needed to speak to him, or whether I needed to contact him so he could call them. I was met with downright rudeness from the receptionist, when all I was trying to do was help to resolve their problem! She didn't even give me the opportunity to say they could ring his mobile instead, she was too busy being rude to me to listen to what I had to say. I wasn't ASKING for information about my DH, I was trying to GIVE it.

hth

I had a call on my landline one day from a local hospital, asking to speak to Mr X. Apparently he hadn’t turned up for an appointment.

I told them they had the wrong number.

They insisted it was right.

I said, ok, but Mr X doesn’t live here.

They asked if they could leave a message.

I told them again that Mr X didn’t live there. Asked if they could please update their records.

“Ok, what’s his new number?”

I said, I don’t know, I’ve never heard of Mr X.

The message finally got through - they apologised and hung up.

Two minutes later, I came back from the kitchen to hear the same person leaving a message on the answerphone. “Hi Mr X, it’s the hospital. We’re trying to update your record. Could you call us back with your new number?”

I really hope it wasn’t anything serious.