“I Think What We’ve Got Here is a Failure to Communicate”*

A veterinarian told me things were awful at work. In addition to being busy seeing a huge influx of pandemic pets, everything took more time due to COVID precautions. Clients were impatient with longer waits, frustrated because they couldn’t get appointments as quickly as usual, and generally short tempered. To make matters worse, receptionists kept quitting.

Efforts to hire new receptionists were discouraging. Older people who applied quit because they couldn’t master the computerized records system. But even more upsetting was the inability of younger hires to master communication skills, both in person and on the phone. These employees were great with the computer but didn’t know how to handle human interactions. They quit because they didn’t know how to de-escalate angry clients and had no idea how to talk to someone who was upset.

This story led me to reflect on my recent experiences. My audiologist hired a lovely new receptionist who was an older woman. She was great talking to me on the phone and in person. But when it came time to check out, she couldn’t work the computer and took ten minutes of the doctor’s time to fix her errors. I’m sure she didn’t last long.

On the other end of the spectrum, I went to an urgent care for a COVID test and was treated rudely by the young receptionist…