Excessive Corporate Inefficiency

This afternoon I got a call from the Essentia Health Fitness Center that I have not made the annual payment for use of the facility.  We never received any notice that this was due.  Last year we were told at the reception desk, and we were able to pay there.

This year, the phone call was my first notice from anyone, Essentia, Medica, or Silver&Fit.  The administrator said we had to pay Silver&Fit directly.

Now the fun begins.

I called the 800 number for Silver&Fit.  I was told by the pleasant recorded voice that there was a very long wait.  Have you seen anything in the papers about this like you’ve seen about MNSure’s wait times?

I went to the Silver&Fit website.  When I began the registration process, it knew my address and phone number just from my name, but then efficiency disappeared.

I had to enter my birthdate in a specific format; the format was not described next to the box. I was asked to select a security question and give the answer.  I clicked “Next” and then I was told how to enter my birthdate.  But then it would not go any further until I selected a security question again.  It showed my answer, but it wouldn’t show the drop-down list again.  It said I needed to select a security question??

I gave up and started a new session.  I ran into similar problems again.  On the third try I found the form for paying by money order.  No form for check or page for using a credit card.

I gave up on that and sent an email of dissatisfaction.  At least there was a link to do so.

I went to the Medica website and managed to find a form for paying by check.

So we each filled out a form, wrote our checks, and put them in a single envelope.  That will probably screw things up at Silver&Fit.  One of us will be credited with another year’s membership and the other not.

With Congress screwing up the Postal Service, it will probably take more than three days to arrive at Silver&Fit, two more days to get to a clerk to open the envelopes, and two more days for Silver&Fit to notify Essentia Health.

It is not the form of an organization, it’s the personnel and management.  Good and bad of these are found in both government and corporations.

BTW I went to St. Louis County Auditor’s License office last week to renew my driver’s license.  The longest part was filling out the form.  Somebody waited on me right away, had me sign the form, took my money, gave me a copy, and asked me to step over to the eye exam device and the camera.  It took me longer to take off my coat than to have my picture taken.  And all this was done with cheer and courtesy.

Tech support gives complex solution; wife gives simple solution

In my article “Technology is great, technology grates” which will be published in the Weekly Reader of Duluth this week, I mention the difficulties that I had with my Logitech Solar Keyboard Folio for my iPad.  The return key didn’t always work.  From Logitech I either got a bureaucratic response from level I support or the advice to reset my iPad.  From my wife I got a much simpler solution.

My email today to Logitech follows:

Earlier this year and again a few weeks ago, I asked what could be done about a return key that didn't work on my Solar Keyboard Folio.  The most concrete advice that I received was to reset my iPad.

I did so both times.  When I did so the last time, I lost a lot of data and settings.  After this last reset, the return key often worked only after I pounded it a few times.  It also seemed to get worse.

My wife suggested that maybe there was debris under it.

Today I took her advice and gave the return key several blasts with a gas duster.

The return key has been working fine every time I used it in this email.

Programmer, heal thyself

The New York Times recently had a link to the Wired story, “Why the New Obamacare Website is Going to Work This Time” by Steven Levy, originally published in the June issue of Wired.  Levy almost gushes how the Ad Hoc team, a small group of young programmers from Silicon Valley and President Obama’s election campaign, greatly simplified the Website.  “[T]hey worked 80-hour weeks to salvage the botched creation of thousands of technocrats employed by 55 different contractors,”

Duh!  A small team can make breakthroughs that a large group cannot.  Think of the original Macintosh team, much smaller and squirreled away in a small building away from all those working on Apple II software.

IBM trumpeted it had a thousand programmers in seven cities on OS 360.  We in Univac smirked that we had less than 40 programmers working in one city on EXEC I.  Even then a contractor built a leaner OS (EXEC II) to build and test the FORTRAN and COBOL compilers they had contracted to build.  EXEC II was much more popular among customers than EXEC I and even its successor EXEC 8.

Making deadlines?  Hah!  We were always shifting ship dates later.

What I wonder is if these same programmers from private industry are so great, why are software “user community” boards so filled with questions, often unanswered?  If these programmers are so great, why are reviews often mixed, some love the program, others hate it.

Way back in the 80s when the Macintosh was the latest “hot thing”, I was eager to get the latest version of the software and found the enhancements great.  Thirty years later, I am reluctant to move up to a major new release.  To often things that worked fine are changed to something that is more difficult to use or doesn’t even work anymore.

With each generation it seems that programs run slower and slower.  Maybe it’s because I’m using a three-year-old Mac with one-year-old software.  I have found suggestions for “cleaning up the system”, but they involve a whole day of backing up data and then another day of creating a “clean install” disc and actually running it.

Consistency of design often seems to be lacking.  If my iPhone is asleep and I get a call, the screen only gives me the option of swiping to accept the call.  However, if my iPhone is active, the screen gives me the choice of accepting or rejecting the call.  Buried in the instruction manual, or was it in the “user community”, in the first case I can reject the call by holding the sleep button and the home button at the same time.  Only a bureaucracy would allow different actions for the same result.

In one of the recent releases, certain buttons may or may not appear for starting and stopping a podcast.  The intent is to have a right-pointing triangle to start or resume a podcast and a double bar to momentarily stop it.  When these symbols suddenly started disappearing, I was glad that I knew where they were supposed to be.  And I have no idea why these buttons sometime appear and sometime don’t.

I have a new problem to research: why does the return button no longer work on my Logitech Solar Keyboard folio for my iPad?  I’ll have to set aside some time to check out the Logitech community about this.

I love all this technology because of all it does for me.  I can write this column on my laptop and email it to the Reader.  I can keep notes and to-do lists on my laptop, phone, and iPad and keep them synched.  I can call my wife from the grocery store to remind me what it was she wanted.  I can use my iPhone as a hot spot at our cabin to write and email this column.

BTW, I’m not writing this at our cabin as planned because another simple technology became an irritation.  Our smoke alarm started going off randomly.  Sometimes it would beep and beep, sometimes it would only give off one set of beeps.  I had a lousy night Saturday night!  Could it be too much moisture in the small tight cabin?  Well, I brought the alarm home, closed the battery compartment, and put it on the bed.  Within twenty minutes it gave off a single set of beeps.  We bought the seven-year warranty alarm in March!

Much is made about about government bureaucracy and corporate efficiency, but corporate bureaucracy in GM led to many deaths because of faulty ignition switches.

To err is human, but to really screw up it takes a computer.  Humans and computers are both in corporations and governments.

Mel considers himself perfect; he never makes mistakes.  Oops, the computer won’t let him misspell mistakes as “misteaks!

Also published in the Reader Weekly, 2014-10-09 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2014/10/09/4191_programmer_heal_thyself

Helpless help desks

I mean helpless in two senses: they often don't help the customers and they often have no influence on the software or other products.

This summer I bought a Westinghouse solar shed light for the outhouse at our cabin.  It's great when stepping into the outhouse from bright sunlight.

I think at some point I forgot to turn the light off and the batteries were drained.  I bought new batteries and the light was working OK.  But wait a minute.  The solar panel charges the rechargeable batteries and I should be able to use the original batteries again.

That seemed to work, but if the light was turned off and then turned on again just a little bit later, the light wouldn't come on, even though it had been bright when turned on.

I emailed the address on the instructions about this problem.  Instead of agreement with my analysis or another suggestion, the responder wanted date of purchase, model number (which I thought I had provided), my name and address, an emailed copy of the receipt, my name and address, and I forget what else.

I replied forget it, I'll try the new batteries again.

I was right!  The light works much better with the new batteries.

Why didn't Westinghouse International Development Corporation train its people to have a set of helpful answers?

We replaced the landline at our cabin with an AT&T Home Base provided by Consumer Cellular, cutting our phone bill to one-third what it was with Frontier.  It works fine, but the time on our answering machine always seemed to be an hour later than the actual time.  It was EDT rather than CDT.  When we turned on the power and I reset the time, the "spoken" time was given to me as the CDT I set.

I tried resetting the answering machine to have the incorrect minutes.  Later on the minutes would be correct but the hour would be one hour off!!

I emailed the friendly folks at Consumer Cellular.  They suggested that it was the answering machine and I should reach out to the manufacturer.  One person also called me; she was sure that the network didn't set the time.  I thanked her and said I would make some tests the next time I was at the cabin.

Today I was at the cabin.  When I turned on the power, I did not reset the answering machine clock as I normally do.  When the handset had recharged enough to read the screen, the time was a few minutes after midnight; that is, it was the number of minutes since I had turned the power on.

I called the cabin phone with a cell phone.  I don't remember if I answered the cabin phone or not.  However, when I looked at the time on the handset it was the correct time plus one hour!!!  In other words, the network is setting the time, albeit incorrectly.

Since the cell phone is a smart phone, I assume it's time is being set by the Internet.  It's time is CDT.

As most people do not turn their answering machines and Home Bases off very often, I'm not too surprised that Consumer Cellular has not heard much about this problem.  I wonder if any of the owners have checked what the time stamp is on left messages.

I am considering sending these companies an invoice for my consulting fees.  I probably won't find a round tuit to do so, but thinking about it does give me a chuckle.  Oh, yeah!  I also fixed a problem with my Mac that The Geek Squad couldn't find.  See "Computer withdrawal symptoms".

Simple questions don't get simple answers from corporate bureaucracies

I bought a really nifty Westinghouse solar powered light for our outhouse at our cabin.  It only cost about $30 and keeps us from stumbling in the dark, especially on a sunny day!!

It started acting up by not turning on again right after it was turned off.  I won't give the details of my investigation, but I did send them as email to Westinghouse's distributor, thinking I would get an explanation or an apology for not having an answer.  Instead I got a bunch of bureaucratese:

To process your order, I will need the following information:

* Full Name
* Mailing Address
* Contact Phone Number
* Purchase Location
* Purchase date
* Item/Model Number found on the BOX.
* Specific Part Number/Letter
* Copy of your purchase receipt with your order # on the top, sent via email attachment, by FAX or by mail.

They already have my name from my email.  I don't know why they need my address and phone number to answer a question, or even where and when I bought it.  I threw out the box, the item is essentially one part for purposes of my question, and I threw out or buried the receipt.  I thought I had the proper model number from Menards online catalog.

I think I'll just try new batteries and see what happens.  If that doesn't work, maybe I'll just ask one of the helpful clerks at Menards the next time I go there.

Whistleblowers deflate bloated bureaucracies

There are those who think Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning have betrayed trust, and there are those who think they exposed excessive and misguided government actions.

Although an organization depends on all involved following certain rules, what should an honorable person do when he or she feels that the organization is working against the public interest?  Will reporting the problem up through the hierarchy eventually solve it?  Or will somebody block it?

In more mundane terms, think of all the problems you have had with products and services.  If you report them to the company or organization, do you really believe that you will find a champion who will right what you think is wrong?  If you think that the reported wrong will be righted, take a peek at support boards of products.  There are some problems that have been going on for years and haven't been fixed yet.

For a better look at this problem in far worse situations than inefficient software, see "The Banality of Systemic Evil", Peter Ludlow, New York Times, 2013-09-15.

A bureaucracy develops own set of rules to function "smoothly".  Think of the bureaucracy of the Titanic.  From the president of White Star Lines to Captain Edward Smith down to deck hands.  Each person had a certain set of responsibilities, but almost none of them had all the information they really needed.  Were they ready to listen to any warning advice?  Was anybody willing to report upward anything that was amiss for a safe voyage?

Did anybody make a big fuss about forward observers not having adequate lights?  Did anybody question the command "women and children only" in the partly full lifeboats?  Did anyone question the locked doors trapping steerage passengers?

Patriotism is the ultimate "bureaucracy".  Not enough of us question why we are using military force.  It is considered unpatriotic to question the government in times of war.  Amazingly, many "patriots" don't think the government can run a post office or devise regulations to protect the public.  But few of them consider that "snafu" is a military term started by the troops.  See "Military Slang", Wikipedia.

Some have said true patriots are those who resist supporting military action.  I'll leave it to you to decide whether Snowden and Manning are patriots or scoundrels.

Let's all praise government workers

A favorite sport of too many people is to bash government as inefficient.

Let us consider the many ways that we should be thankful to government.

Let's start with the rather prosaic in Minnesota.  We have had a lot of snow in Minnesota this month.  Schools have been closed and events cancelled.  But the plow operators were out clearing streets and alleys at all hours.  Major streets were opened almost immediately, other streets within a few hours, and alleys within a few hours more.  The plow operators are union city workers that are doing their best to battle nature without damaging parked cars.  Are they greedy union workers or are they people requesting just compensation for the difficult work they do?

A favorite target of many anti-government people is the U.S. Postal Service.  Sometime after nine I got busy on the walkway around our house.  I wanted to make sure our carrier didn't have much difficulty.  I saw her park almost in front of our house rather than down the street, just about on her usual schedule. Before I could even get to the front walk, Sara came trudging up the steps in nine-inch drifts.  She said that if she hadn't seen me, she would have waited until tomorrow to deliver our mail, none of it urgent.  Maybe regulations don't cover her discretion, but she was making a very good effort at delivering important mail in a timely fashion for all on her route.

Then there is the big government operation in Boston.  It is just amazing how the federal, state, and local criminal investigation bureaucracies worked through thousands of pieces of information to determine who the prime suspects were, locate them, and fatally wound one of them.  As I write this, the other is apparently cornered in a boat in somebody's yard.  All of this in less than a week.

Netflix comes out ahead again on customer service and trust

We put a Netflix DVD in a mailbox outside a post office on Sunday, October 14.  On Saturday, October 20, it was still listed as not returned.  I clicked on a button about returns, noted that I had returned it on October 14, clicked that it was a street mail box, gave my ZIP code, clicked OK or whatever, and poof!  The DVD was no longer in my account as not returned!!!

We thought about the problem a bit and wondered if it was because we opened the mailer at the wrong end.  That cut off the closing tab from the return envelope.  My wife jury-rigged a closure.  Maybe that closure didn't hold and the package wound up getting jammed in a sorting machine.  I also realized that the post office where we returned the DVD does not have the same ZIP code as we do.

I called Netflix and within two minutes was speaking with Travis of the cheery voice.  Essentially he said, "Don't worry.  It's not your problem.  It will probably turn up."

I know there are lots of company's that take the customer's word about a problem and make amends quickly.  But there are also many company's that don't trust their customers any farther than they can throw them.  The former are companies that treat their employees with respect; the latter are companies that create rule-burdened bureaucracies.

The Coffee Party, demand, and civility

I've been a member of the Coffee Party for some time, and I follow them on Facebook.  Now and then I add a comment to one article or another.

I have a Coffee Party bumper sticker that I haven't used yet that states "Incite Civility and Reason".  The Coffee Party often suggests that members write this politician or that government office to demand something or other.  But is demanding some outcome "civility and reason"?

"Demand" is something done by ideologues, not by somebody trying to be civil and reasonable.

How would you handle this customer service?

I went to the corner about eight this morning to get the Sunday Duluth News Tribune. There were none in the machine. On the other hand, there was at least one copy of the Star Tribune in the other machine. Generally, it is the reverse. The daily Star Tribunes often are gone by eight and sometimes even by seven.

Whoever stocks these machines doesn't practice Magree's first law of inventory: you know you have stocked enough product when you have exactly one left at the next restocking. If you have two left, you know you stocked too much the last time. If you have none left, you have no idea on how many you might have sold if more had been available.

So, since two papers are too much to read on Sunday, we did without a paper at breakfast. On our way to our cabin for the day, we picked up a Duluth News Tribune at a gas station. I didn't really look at it and put it in a box in the back of our SUV.

Before we started eating our lunch, I separated the paper, mostly set aside all the ads. There were no comics! Oh, horrors! There was no sports. So what! There was no local news and no opinion pages! We can't do without those! We were left only with the front section and "Scrapbook", the section of puzzles, obituaries, anniversaries, and other personal events. We checked and double checked for the missing sections. The only non-glossy sections we had were the front section, "Scrapbook", and one section of classified.

When we came back to Duluth we stopped at the gas station we bought the paper at. The clerk hadn't heard anybody remark about missing sections. I went back to the news rack and checked a copy. It had everything. There was no set of other sections behind the pile. I told the clerk that another copy had all the sections. I did not offer to buy another copy.

So, now what is the appropriate customer service?

The clerk probably had no authority to offer me another copy. Typical of bureaucratic organizations.

A manager might have offered me another copy. Better organizations allow this flexibility.

An owner of a locally owned service station likely would have offered me another copy. He or she has a personal interest in my being a return customer.

If any of the above knew me personally, they might or might not have offered me another copy, depending on how strongly they felt it would have been a good-will gesture.

There is no right answer, but organizations that put satisfaction of random customers above a rigid procedure often do better than those who follow every "jot and tittle" of the rules.

Corporate bureaucracies eat into other corporations' profits

I've often said that government has no corner on bureaucracy.  Almost any large organization, for-profit, non-profit, government, has a large bureaucracy.  They have to in order to look into many, many details that are needed to run the organization efficiently.  You read that right, an organization needs a bureaucracy to be efficient.

Who is going to do the details of hiring and firing?  Who is going to process the payroll for thousands of employees.  Who is going to pay and collect the bills.  Certainly not the executives.  Certainly not the employees involved in developing new products. Certainly not the employees providing goods or services to customers.

The purpose of a bureaucracy is to take care of details that free other employees to do the primary work of the organization.

One corporate bureaucracy is customer support.  These are the folks that process customer questions and complaints and attempt to find solutions.  When run well, customer support provides satisfaction to the customers and feedback to the rest of the organization.  When customer support is not given organization support, it devolves into an unresponsive bureaucracy.  The result is less customer satisfaction, which in turn can lead to the demise of the organization.

A case study is the corporation many love to hate but many depend on for the functioning of their own organizations - Microsoft.

I mentioned my calendar problems in "Quote of the day - Ease of use" and "Misdirected ire".

Since then, I've been subscribing to a thread "Meetings disappearing" on Microsoft's Apple Support Discussions.  Hoo Boy!  Talk about non-responsiveness!  This thread has been going on since February and there appears to be no resolution.

Well, maybe there was some resolution.  Many report that if they set up a regular weekly appointment for a year and then change one, all subsequent appointments disappeared!  How often are regular meetings changed in your organization?  Sometimes changed meetings become the norm.  What was the solution that one writer said Microsoft proposed?  Set up 52 individual appointments for the year!!  Wow!  That certainly is a shining example of productivity improvement.  Guess what?  When the user changed one of the 52 individual appointments, the subsequent appointments disappeared.

What a way to run a railroad or any business!  I've had better responsiveness from city, state, and federal bureaucracies.

More foibles of free enterprise

I write these little diatribes against "free enterprise" not because I oppose "free enterprise" but because I get tired of those who believe "free enterprise" should be free to do what it damn well pleases and that government can do nothing right.

"Free enterprise" and government are both human creations and, as such, can do wonderful things and can really screw up.  The latest free enterprise screw up screwed up my day recently.

I use my computer and my iPod to keep my calendar.  Because I prefer the calendar in Microsoft Outlook, I have to use Apple's iCal on my computer to synchronize the iPod calendar and the Outlook calendar.  Normally this works "seamlessly", but a few times it hasn't.

Last week the calendar on my iPod became blank.  All the entries had disappeared.  Years of past data and months of future data gone without any effort on my part.  I checked iCal on my computer; all that data was gone also.   I checked the Outlook calendar and the data was all there, whew!

But, could I restore the data to the other two calendars by synching or would the Outlook data be wiped out also?

Off to the wonderland of Apple support.  With most large companies, this doesn't mean talking with an "expert" anymore.  Instead you have to rely on hundreds or thousands of other customers asking and answering questions.  This means sifting through dozens, if not hundreds, of messages that seem to be about a problem similar to yours.

There were many threads about iCal calendars disappearing, going back to 2006 (or was it 2004).  I'm using the latest publicly available version of OS X (10.6.7). Come on, Apple, can't you get this problem fixed permanently in five years?

I did find a suitable solution, which involved deleting a certain folder from the Library folder and replacing it with a backup copy from before the error occurred.  Well, the certain folder wasn't where the message said it was, but it was close enough for me to find it.  Second problem for many people is how often do they even back up their Library folder.

Fortunately, I have installed Apple's Time Machine, which frequently backs up my internal hard drive to an external hard drive.  And it backs up multiple copies for up to a month.  I selected a copy of the folder from when I knew my calendar had data.

Bingo!  The computer iCal was restored and after I synched the iPod, I had both calendars up-to-date, sort of.

But I was not home free.  After the Outlook calendar was synched with iCal, I had double entries for many events.  I still haven't removed all the duplicates.

A half day shot for the "efficiency" of free enterprise.  Those who make the false comparison between free enterprise and government either don't use computers or are blinded by their ideology.

I'm not completely unsympathetic to the problems of software.  When I closed my software business fifteen years ago, I had a problem book at least nine pages long.  That program was a toy compared to the complexity of most software today.  Much of modern software is not the product of one programmer in a home office, but of a vast bureaucracy.  The bureaucracy screws up a lot, but boy, we still get lots of great stuff from the bureaucracy, be it corporate or government.

Government inefficient, business efficient? Hah!

The following is the second message that I've sent in the last two days to Wells Fargo; Wells Fargo manages shareholder reinvestment accounts for Allete.

Once again you are emailing me that "A new Allete, Inc. tax form has been posted to your account", and once again that form is for the 2009 tax year, identical to the one I received a year ago, and at least twice this past few weeks.

The 2010 Form 1099 should have a larger amount than the 2009 form because I have the dividends reinvested.

I think I'll post this business inefficiency to my blog: http://magree.blogspot.com

Isn't Wells Fargo one of the banks involved in improper foreclosures?  A Google search for "wells fargo foreclosures" yields "Judge Rejects Wells Fargo Foreclosure Documents Again", Daily Finance, Abigail Field, 2010-12-10.

I'm glad that I long ago paid off my truck loan with Northwestern Bank (now Wells Fargo).  At least they couldn't repossess it from me for some obscure technicality; I sold it.

National Security? The emperor and his clothes

This morning at coffee, various wars came up in the conversation.

I mentioned Andrew Bacevich and his books, especially "Washington Rules, America's Path to Permanent War".  I said that the Department of Defense has become a vast bureaucracy where few question many of the assumptions.  It's another case of nobody noticing the emperor has no clothes.

A World War II veteran, shot down over France, hidden by the Resistance, and smuggled out through Spain, said, "Department of Defense!  It should be called the Department of Offense!"

Later, another person who comes up with many good puns, which unfortunately we soon forget, asked, "Does an immortal emperor have no closure?"

If the national security bureaucracy thinks it is immortal in its path to permanent war, we certainly will have no closure.

Federal government has no corner on bureaucracy

In December I signed up for online bill pay for our cabin telephone. Last month I received an email that my online bill was ready, I went online and paid it. A few days later I received the paper bill in the mail. This situation was repeated this month

I emailed that phone company about it. The response was, "It takes 2 to 3 billing cycles before you stop receiving paper statements." Maybe I could paraphrase this as, "It takes 2,000 to 3,000 customer suggestions before a company stops wasteful practices."

See also "The Federal Government Has No Corner on Bureaucracy", Reader Weekly, 2008-01-03.

The bureaucracy doesn't want the truth

Whether it's a government or a corporate bureaucracy, it sometimes doesn't want the truth, but the "right" answer.

I've put myself in this bind because of some passwords or secret question answers I've created. Rather than creating a "true" answer, I've created misleading answers. So if I'm asked a secret question, I can't give the true answer, I may only give the right answer, which I may have forgotten!!

For more on this, see "The True Answer and The Right Answer", Stanley Fish, New York Times, 2010-01-11.

Bureaucracy can exist in any economic model

Many people complain about government bureaucracy as if it went away everything would be so much better. Unfortunately, bureaucracies occur in organizations of all types and sizes. They occur in government, in non-profits, and in profits.

We should also note that some employees have flexibility in almost any type of organization. I had a water inspector accept on my word that our usage dropped because I replaced a washer, not that something had happened to our meter.

The incident that triggered this blog entry was an automated call from a non-profit medical center reminding me of an appointment in two days. Some hours earlier that department had called me to move the appointment to next week. Left hand, please meet the right hand!

A couple of weeks ago I had sent an online problem report to a well-known computer manufacturer. I received a boiler plate response about checking that I had the latest version of the operating system and the latest version of the software with the problem. That information was automatically included in my report.

Today I discovered there was a work around to my problem, but it was not obvious. There were several non-intuitive steps involved. I sent a report to the agent who had initially responded to my problem report, including the suggestion that what I wanted should be a menu item. She thanked me for the report and suggested that I send the manufacturer a feedback suggestion. Duh! Couldn't she and shouldn't she do that herself? Shouldn't somebody in the call center be looking at the reports and extracting trends?

See also my "The Federal Government has no corner on bureaucracy", Reader Weekly, 2008-01-03.

One of the many hidden costs of healthcare

Every month I receive a statement from the medical center we use. Part of me says to ignore it unless it says "Pay this amount". After all, why should I? The agent that sold us the Medicare supplement said, "You will never see another medical bill."

He exaggerated a bit because there are certain optional services that are not covered by Medicare, supplemental insurance, or other insurance programs. Like contact lenses. Insurance will cover glasses, but not contact lenses. At least for us who use them by choice.

In fact, optometrists offices will not turn over contact lenses until the patient has paid for them. I was surprised one year to see that the cost of contact lenses was passed on to Medicare even though I had paid for them. When I called the medical center office about this, I was told that they sent it on for deniability. I gave up trying to argue with a non-profit bureaucrat. Fortunately, this pass on has not occurred again.

However, the cost of the "contact lens evalution" is both not covered and not immediately passed on to the patient. It has run from $32 to $36 over the last few years. One year the medical center wrote it off before even charging me, one year I paid it after a few months without even being billed for it, and other years I wait until I'm billed for it.

On my July statement I was finally billed for the May 2008 contact lens evaluation. I paid the $35 without question. The cost for my May 2009 contact lens evaluation was carried forward on the June and July statements. The August statement is due in a few days. I bet the $36 for this year's evaluation will still be carried forward.

One of the marks of a successful organization is good cash flow. That is get payments due as soon as possible; then you have cash to pay your own bills and invest in new equipment, and so forth. $30-something may not be much in the big scheme of things, but how many of these little charges are floating around without being billed? How many larger charges are waiting on various non-profit, corporate, and government bureaucracies waiting for a judgement?

Here is the first place to "wring efficiencies" out of the system.