Horror stories...

Hello faithful readers!

Hubby and I were out to eat with the kiddos last night (-2, since Kaia and Lilli were at their Dad's.) and we were having a discussion about various folks we know on Facebook and different posts we've gotten involved commenting on.

I recently got into it with a friend of a friend on someones post regarding health insurance. Now, before you roll your eyes, this is not a post detailing the pros and cons of the ACA or anything like that. Some people love it, some hate it, etc. But the person I was talking to in this post, started spouting off what I felt was gross misinformation regarding the NHS in Britain.

Now, not to brag, but thanks to the fact that I'm married to a Brit, and said Brit continued living in England, and both using and working for the NHS for four years of our marriage, and because of him I now have loads of British family that also use the NHS, I feel a little more qualified to speak on the subject than most American's can claim to be.

This person began by calling the ACA 'socialized medicine' which it most certainly is not, but that is a post for another day. They then began bashing the NHS and all countries that have social medicine as having terrible systems, long waits, etc. So I jumped in and corrected her on several points, straight from things my husband himself, and members of his family, experienced. (plus my husband is more acquainted with the inner workings of the NHS than most Brits because he spent nearly 20 years working for them) She then retorted about having lots of friends in both England and Canada who would say otherwise and one that supposedly died after waiting three years for gall bladder surgery and then dying of an infection.

So now to the main point of my post. I titled it 'Horror Stories' for a reason. Because whenever you go to use a particular Dr., hospital, Dentist, etc, or get ready to go through some kind of big life event, like a wedding, birth, etc. people seem to crawl out of the woodwork with 'horror stories' of something terrible that happened either to them, their immediate family, or their cousins, sisters, husbands mother's cousin twice-removed...you get the point. In a lot of cases, this can make the person hearing the story think twice about seeing said Dr or going to said hospital.

Now I'm not going to deny that bad things happen to good people through no fault of their own. It happens, either from honest mistakes made by a company or an employee of a company or from the willful, malicious actions of a dishonest person or company. But having worked in customer service for many years, I  have come to notice something.

Probably 90% of horror stories were either caused by, or made worse by, the person telling the story in the first place.

How many times have you made an honest mistake at work and had to beg the forgiveness of a client or customer only to turn around and be terribly cruel to someone that did the same? The old saying that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar is a true one. If you are always gracious, even when someone messes up, they will honestly bend over backwards to want to help you about 90% of the time. Granted, there are exceptions, but more often than not, it's true.

Most of the time I go out of my way to be nice to people serving in restaurants, because I used to work in one. Unless someone is deliberately rude to me, in any case. But being nice has gotten me money off a bill, or free product. It pays to be nice and it doesn't cost you a cent.

Kevin told me stories of how people in Britain would be given an appointment for a surgery, like gall bladder surgery, and then say things like "But I wanted to go on Holiday that week." so then they'd have to wait longer. Or, how people wait a long time in Dr offices because 1 out of 3 appointments doesn't turn up. So the office overbooks to compensate, but then some people do turn up and then have to wait. It's because of inconsiderate people, not the organization itself!

If you are rude or escalate a situation with rude behavior, instead of focusing on helping you, the person involved has to focus on defending themselves. That takes their attention off your problem, which is what you don't want.

Sometimes bad things happen because of one person and a whole organization gets a bad rap because of it. I had all my babies at the hospital in Winchester, and had great experiences. But there is one Dr. that I know of who does gall bladder and appendix surgeries and the like who is an incompetent boob. And most of the hospital 'horror stories' I've heard involve him. It's not the hospital, it's the Dr.! So instead of going around bad mouthing the hospital, write a letter to the medical license board to investigate a bad Dr. Then you are at least doing something productive!

The point of this post is this, while 'horror stories' have their uses, please take them all with a grain of salt. Do your own checking into things, your own research. Don't just blindly go off someone else's experience. They might be the only person out of 100 that had a bad experience and it might have even been their own fault!

And yes, the same can be said for people who've had good experiences too. But again, just make up your own mind. Do some research. Talk to people who've had both good and bad experiences. Make an informed decision. Don't just take the word of one person as gospel.

Okay, I'm done ranting now ;)

Thanks,

Dawn