Saturday 29 October 2011

Booking nightmare

Monday 7th March 2011

In the post that morning were two letters from the hospital asking me to make appointments to see the Pain Man and the Hand Man.

Normally when hospital appointments come through a time, date and hospital, is chosen for me. Not this time.

I was given a choice of making the appointments: online; giving them a ring or by contacting my GP surgery. I chose online.

It should have been straight forward, pick the hospital, the time etc. However at the very end when it came to confirm the appointment for the Pain Man, the site crashed.

As I hadn’t been given a ‘print this’ appointment letter paper, like I had to for the Hand Man, I thought I’d just needed to go through the booking process again as nothing had been confirmed.

It would seem that although the computer hadn’t instructed me to ‘print this’, it had reserved the 9.am appointment for me. However as I didn’t have the ‘print this’ appointment letter, I rang the Appointments Help Line to see if they could issue me with the letter.

“I’m sorry but that 9am appointment has been taken”, said the little Help Line woman.

“Yes by me”, I said, “so can you send me an appointment letter”.

“No”, she replied, “your name isn’t down for that appointment”.

“So who has got the 9am appointment”, I asked.

“No-one”, replied the operator.

“Can you not give it to me, seeing as I had already booked it”.

“We can’t because it has already been booked”.

“Yes, by me !!!!”, I exclaimed.

When John came home from work that night I explained what had happened.

“This happens all the time”, he said, “give it a couple of days and by then the system will have realised that the booking is phantom and release it”.

Sure enough the phantom booking was released and eventually got my 9am appointment back….

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.