Matt Lauer is looking at a serious downgrade in his lifestyle

[Ms. Toad]

30. Sorry.

I'm probably one of your cranky customers, if it is health insurance.

It took me 200 hours of effort to resolve a $100 mistake that the insurance company and the hospital made. The insurance company made the first error and spread its own error out over three separate corporations, none of which were permitted to talk to the other. Once I finally got that resolved (after three surgical procedures in which they made the exact same error), they sucked back the money they paid from the out-of-network corporation and repaid it through the in-network corporation, then the hospital treated my copay as having been sucked back by the insurance company and started dunning me for the unpaid bill.

I wouldn't have sworn at you or called you a bitch - but I definitely had to get pretty firm at times because - at least at this insurance company - part of the job of the customer-facing reps was to prevent the customer from moving up the ladder.

I can't tell you how many times I immediately asked to speak to a supervisor, only to be told that the person who answered the phone had to try to help me first. So I'd launch into exactly what had gone wrong, how it had gone wrong, and what needed to be done to fix the problem. I'd tell them exactly what to look for in files I'd never seen (because in 200 hours you can learn a lot about a computer system you've never seen). More often than not, 30 minutes after the call started, they would still try to put me off by telling me they would look into it and call me back. I got tired of that by the 3rd time no one had called me back and I had to start all over a 4th time with a new rep.

I'm sure I was not a pleasant customer - and folks like you shouldn't be put in the position of having to resolve problems you can't solve - all-the-while blocking access to people who have a slightly better chance of resolving the problem.

When honey doesn't work (which I always started with, and it almost never worked), I'm afraid I got pretty cranky. I know that it wasn't the fault of the person on the other end of the line, but that person was in charge of making me go away - and I was completely at a loss for how to get through that person to the one with authority to solve the problem.

I'd love suggestions for how to get to the actual problem solvers without needing to be so demanding when being polite isn't getting me anywhere.