david wins big-time

back during our ikea furniture delivery saga, a hot topic of conversation around here was, "david or goliath -- who will win?" goliath, of course, was played by corporate hegemon ikea. and, in a surprise turn, in the role of david was... the sweet innocent little university of chicago hospitals medical records office!

see, long ago, p requested a copy of her complete medical record so she could give it to whatever new doctors she started seeing here in germany. she even went to the office in person before we left chicago, and they were like "yep, it should be in the mail this afternoon". and about a month later they did sorta mail it, only it went to the wrong address and they left half of it out, so p has had to continue to battle with them to get the whole thing.

and from here there have been enough twists and turns and blinding levels of incompetence that there's no hope of accurately documenting all the atrocities, but let's just say that p has called the office at least 10 times since we've been over here, and when she spoke to them a couple weeks ago the story was that the records had finally been shipped express the previous day via the usps.

(so, right, the point is that at some point we had a nice little race to the bottom between ikea and the records office to see which would be the bigger fuckup, hence the david vs. goliath thing.)

only -- surprise! -- the records never showed up. p called them yesterday to ask what was going on, and they told her -- directly contradicting what they'd said before -- that they shipped the records fedex the day after she'd last spoken to them! bastards! but at least they gave her a tracking number.

so then p wrote to fedex, and... they wrote back saying that while a tracking number had been assigned, the sender never transfered the package to them! i mean, are you kidding me? seriously? and she just got off the phone with them again, and the guy she spoke to (the supervisor, no less) said he personally was the one to fedex the records. but like we believe that for a second.

so that's where things stand now, i guess. i'm not sure if it really comes across how unbelievable this all is. this isn't just some customer service quibble -- these are p's medical records, and she's sick. (i just had p read over this post, and she said it's not nearly fiery enough.) anyone want to set the over/under line on when the damn things arrive?