YOUR EMPLOYEES ARE NOT YOUR FRIENDS

The office is a legit office now with dozens of appointments per day, six employees with grad degrees or above and a dedicated team of three subcontractors whose livelihood is the commissions they earn for doing battle with insurance companies on our behalf. I, Job Creator. Seriously looking at turning my wife's office into a stairwell and claiming half of the upstairs. We have two EHRs, because God is dead, and our business is one that attracts bright, earnest and selfless young ladies who excel at personal interaction and empathy and suck mutherfucking ass at technology. Nonetheless we have two EHRs, because God is dead.

Technological solutions can be had. We can fax within both EHRs. One of them has e-prescribing. I now have a phone system that will handle everything from, well, us clear on out to a resort (with wakeup calls!) or a call center (with prioritized hunt and recording!) or a multinational (with videoconferencing!). Unfortunately we're the worst kind of client - there's no consistency as to who is doing what on any given day and our clientele tend to be the people who aren't interested in making an appointment online to get the drug their television told them about. No, ours are the records that get "touched" a lot. So these granola-ass Luddites end up not only dealing with two EHRs, because God is dead, they also have a formidable amount of folklore spread across a variety of platforms. OneNote. A contact manager. WhatsApp. A corkboard. Post-it notes. Three different spiral-bound notebooks. They don't use email - at all - because they're all under 35 and Luddites. And they'll go "this Bluetooth you got me sucks because it doesn't talk to the front desk phone from 75 feet away and it's your fault for not knowing that's what I needed it for."

You've got a choice: you can say "the universe works this way, fucking cope" and decrease job satisfaction and the camaraderie that one gets from a Coven or you can say "...lemme see what I can do" and recognize that the telecommunications requirements of your wife's business are substantially more complex than the 1500 seat GSA call center you designed in 2006.

The thing that sucks? They don't care. They resent having to do any of this shit because if they wanted to do TPS reports they wouldn't have sunk $80k into a degree that pays them $60k a year. Whatever stupid ad-hoc solution they've come up with that doesn't really work? It's their solution and then obviously better than your solution, which works. Yesterday? Yesterday I had to deal with the utter hopelessness of moving the "HOLD" button two inches to the left. Despite the fact that it moved so that now four phones would ring, rather than one, the way they wanted it. Despite the fact that it took two hours of command-line warfare to get that working. Despite the fact that my front desk can now be answered from Kathmandu if need be because fuckin' hell, one of 'em was in Mozambique last month.

And I can't really bitch. If I were being paid to be tech support, this would be my job. I'm not being paid because it fucks with my unemployment - which has been held up for three months because apparently you need to resubmit to the state of California four times (and have a hearing about identity fraud) before they go "uh, hey buddy your wages are being reported to Washington". But all I'm getting out of this? Is scorn. And the iron-clad conviction that CRM is everything wrong with commerce, Slack will never be worth $12 per person per month (or $99 per person per month if you want HIPAA-compliance) and that Comcast may Care? But the fundamental tools used to interact with customers are not dissimilar from the fundamental tools used to interact with beef on the hoof.

phone rings JOE SCHMO ANYPLACE USA WIFE STELLA DAUGHTER JOSIE LIKES HAMBURGERS DON'T BRING UP CANCER

"Hey, Joe! Haven't talked to you since" (checks notes) "Thursday January 18 2019 at 18:47GMT! How's your... Daughter... Josie? ... Oh, he's Joe Junior now? "(types furiously) "And you'd rather never talk about it again" (typing intensifies) "great great! Yeah! How's that pallet of widgets we shipped on February 4th 2019 that was signed for by Lars doing? Oh yeah?... Hmmm..." (searches answerbase, IMs tech support with caps lock on) "Have you tried restarting them?... Yes you're right it's stupid to restart an entire pallet of widgets so..." (searches answerbase, caps lock intensifies) "Have you tried logging out and logging back in?"

My shit? My shit's on hold 'cuz we had three and a half snowdays followed by four births in three days in the middle of which I got "we now have three front desk girls not two how long will it take you to recreate every goddamn customization" and I had to rip down there and rebuild the world because ZOMG THE PHONE IS NOT RINGING because someone decided to "tidy" and unplugged it. And neither of the two extant girls decided to tell the new girl about the magical folklore that makes things run so she invented her own new folklore. And I can deploy a whole new system? That was designed to catch all the spilled marbles? But apparently we play marbles and wartops and WHY IS IT NOT CATCHING THE TOPS.

But they are ever so thankful

When you tighten the screw on the handle of the shred bin

Because they understand "screws"

And for some reason have judged them to be beyond their abilities

So really, if you want thanks and accolades? don't try to glue two goddamn EHRS (because God is dead) across four accounts and a phone system that works from Kathmandu because really, they're much more impressed if you open a fucking jar for them.