Patient
My real doctor is a private physician back in the San Francisco Peninsula area. He warned me that professional skills such as medicine drop to the bottom of the barrel as the distance to upscale urban areas increases. He was right! Living in the country I thought - "Heck! I'll just see a cardiologist down the road in Oakdale (the cowboy capital of the world they call it)". Bad idea. Front office person has a loud screeching voice like a parrot. The waiting room is half the size of the bathroom across the hall from my real doctor's office. Seriously - the waiting room for Stanislaus Cardiology is the smallest I've ever seen. With no decoration except glaringly bright lights. No magazines or background music as it would be wasted on the geriatric crowd who mostly enjoyed chatting up what they ate last night, or that their AC broke. There is no partition to separate the front office gal like in a real doctor's waiting room - she's in the same stuffy broom closet with the patients she stacks up in what I call "load'em up scheduling". You get to listen to her every screech on the phone or inane conversations with patients. Appointment? Not really; they just has everyone show up in "in the afternoon" knowing some won't show, others will be late, etc. and they can all sit smelling each other's BO in the holding pit. I left after a futile hour of waiting. One patient came in who had an appointment on the 14th - but it was the 15th. "Oh, honey that was yesterday!". Darn that Alzheimer's! The screeching parrot yakked with her endlessly like she was a child. Apparently so many of Stanislaus Cardiology's patients are senile that the parrot lady speaks in a loud voice as if they were all deaf. She spoke condescendingly, repeating sentences, like everyone was a dolt. When she talked that way to me I called attention to it which got her really mad. Then she told the doctor I was nasty and he would not see me! Seriously! The so called "professional" in the office was as contemptuous of me as the front office parrot. So he blew off my appointment to get on with the bus load of disoriented seniors. Heck, I'm 62 but this place was ridiculous. Oakdale is the cowboy capital of the world? Then is Dr. Kahn a rodeo clown? I'll check in with a class act when I visit the Bay Area. That's it for me and hayseed medical services. Learned a lesson I did. My Doctor was right - professional quality falls off proportionally to the distance from civilization.