For the three years I lived back in my home town of Asheville, North Carolina, I had a job as a customer service representative at a medical supply company. I started there as a temp from an agency, but then my boss there ended up hiring me.
There were many things that I could say about that job, good and bad, that I may write about in other entries. On the whole, though, the entire experience was as a good one where I got to work with some very admirable people, and be involved in a kind of work that is clearly beneficial to the world. It was a job that assisted in the getting into the hands of hospitals, doctor’s offices, nursing homes, and even retail customers even though this was primarily a wholesale company.
There were four of us working in that position, each one having a cubicle. I was the newest one of the four, and at first it seemed that I could not possibly function in that job. The company sold any and everything that had to do with anything medical, everything from needles to band aids to surgical kits to nurses clothing to medications to examination tables to waiting room furniture to art on the walls, and much, much more.
Most of the orders came in via telephone (although some came via fax) and the phones rang constantly. Many of the people who were calling to order supplies would have only the sparsest description, such as, “we need another case of shot needles”, and it was up to use to know what were the ones they liked, or if they didn’t know what they needed, it was up to us to hurry up and figure it out. Yes, the company also had a sales force that was mostly out in the field, but for the most part, the actual connections were with the customer service representatives.
Thank goodness I discovered that the company had copious catalogues and I filled the shelves in my cubicle with them all, and during whatever time I could spare, I would pour through them to learn all the items they had in them. The other reps blew me away, because they would rattle out the appropriate item numbers, of which there were an infinite amount. “Oh, you need the BD102439-X, would you like a dozen more cases?” I would hear that kind of thing coming from, say, the cubicle next to me, and I would nearly be paralyzed, how could I ever function like that? I have trouble remembering even my own telephone number, let alone intimately know millions of equipment item numbers. Learning Japanese would be easier that that!
But sure enough, and miraculously, those numbers and the characteristics of every kind of medical supply ultimately got burned into my brain, and I had developed numerous hospitals and medical offices whose employees considered me to be their chosen customer service representative.
Throughout all this, I had the boss who had hired me, Charley, who was a southern “good ol’ boy” (which I say positively, not negatively). He would arrive in to work on his impressive Harley. When he and his wife went on vacation, they went on bike/camping/fishing trips all around the south, Charley in front, his wife hugging him from behind. He was a no-nonsense, tough, strict man with high work standards, who would fire on a dime, yet watched over me kindly. He liked my progress and if representatives of a hospital called him up to asked him if I could come their hospital to meet all of them and have a lunch with them, he would let me go, because he knew that ours wasn’t the only medical supply company in town and as you know, often the most important business connection is the person you get on the phone and how they handle you. So a guy like me was not only keeping the business, but actually expanding it. There were many lessons I got from that job that helped me a lot later since. I think working in customer service might even be a better education than college.
Charley was also generous with my raises, which of course I was greatly thankful for. And he didn’t stop me from taking what I considered to be additional privileges that were fun for me but also helpful for the company. I was allowed in the warehouse portion of the building where customer service reps normally didn’t go. Sometimes a client would be in a lurch and needed to make sure that we had a certain item that they needed in a hurry, so I would go into the warehouse to verify that what they wanted was actually in stock (not necessarily being dependent upon the data on the computer) and maybe pick their order myself, had permission to drive the picking machine that could elevate you way up to the top shelves in the warehouse. If, alas, we were out of something that was desperately needed, I could nose around the stacks and find a suitable substitute that was actually on hand, and take it all over to the shipping department for immediate packing up for delivery.
I also developed the useful privilege of going into the medicine freezers. That was probably the most sacrosanct area of the warehouse. Every employee needed to pass the “pee test” before hire, and then would be sprung upon us at random later, because there were some powerful drugs (narcotics) locked up in those freezers. There were certain series of medications that patients of a doctor’s office would be on that required having the same lot number in a series, let’s say a series of four of a particular medicine. There were some item pickers in the warehouse who would send out the correct medication by name, but neglect selecting the correct lot number if part of a required series, which was a pain for the pickers, but crucial for the patient. It was customer service who would receive those angry phone calls from the doctor’s office, saying that the wrong lot number had been sent out. So I took it upon myself to find the right ones myself whenever an office ordered one of those medications. Sometimes you had to really hunt around stacks of medications in order to find one with the right lot number. Instead of interfering, I was helping the busy stock pickers, plus helping the patients. I also developed good relations with the packers, becoming good friends with them, which also made my job a whole lot easier since speed and accuracy in shipping was sometimes a crucial thing when it came to “on-time” medical supplies and sending out the wrong thing was not acceptable.
Also, I became the go-to person for retail sales, people from the general public who would drive out to the industrial boonies where we were to buy retail supplies from us at wholesale prices. Most of them were on Medicare and were getting some rebates on their supplies that were needed chronically, such as colonoscopy bags, catheters, and feeding tubes. I was the only one there who wasn’t afraid of filling out the Medicare forms, and when customers had troubles getting their purchases accepted by Medicare, they would come back to me and I would go to bat for them by calling Medicare and making sure those customers got the rebates they were due.
Charley always seemed to keep a watchful eye on all this that was going on and apparently he was appreciating what I was doing, and lets just say that not every boss I ever had in my life was good like that.
Since I had become a “voice” between the company and the outer world, Charley happened to let me know that the company’s policy was to never give out any references regarding former employees. I have mentioned that Charley would fire on a dime, well, just in case somebody happened to call me in order to obtain an evaluation of a former employee, he wanted me to know that nobody was to say anything about a former employee other than they worked there from this date to that one, but nothing else whatsoever.
Since a good friend of mine had been hired from the place, I guess he felt that my friend might ask me to be a reference for him as he attempted to get a new job. I assumed that Charley figured this might happen and so he wanted me to know that I was not allowed to say anything. (As it happened, my friend never asked for that.)
I said to Charley, “Really, why?” He explained that saying something bad about a former employee might lead to the company being sued, and they wanted to avoid that.
I said, “Yeah, but what about the good employees? Don’t they deserve to have their good performances shared?”
He said, “Well, you can’t do that, because then it becomes clear when you are avoiding giving out a bad reference when you give out only the good ones. The safest course is to never say anything about their performance no matter what. And besides, what do we care, they are people who left us, so we really have no skin in their game anyway.”
Well, as time moved on, as much as I loved living back in my home town, I decided to move back to California. It was kind of funny to see how many of my coworkers were scared for me at the prospect of going back to California, and to Los Angeles, no less (that hellhole!). I had always felt that California had a good reputation with people in other states, and in fact maybe was even envied, but that is actually not always the case. Their general attitude about my moving back there was, “Oh, please be careful! We wouldn’t want to even visitthere!”
It’s funny, because as I think back on it, I remember reading many years ago an article by a man living in Argentina who went on a trip in his Volkswagen from the Tierra Del Fuego all the way up to the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska. Reading that, I thought to myself that I would love to be able to go on a trip like that (the entire west coast of the Pacific Ocean), but I would be too afraid to. Surely there were some extremely dangerous locations on that route, portions of Colombia, Nicaragua, El Salvador or Honduras (take your pick), Mexico (with the drug cartels, for heaven’s sake), even (or especially) the Alaska Highway, from which I imagined ones car ending up thoroughly pummeled by loose rocks along the way, but he wrote that the trip was glorious and the most dangerous place on that whole trip wasLos Angeles!
It actually was a sad day when I had to tell Charley that I was going to go back to California. I had managed to really make a place for myself in that company where I had ended up even having a positive reputation up in the national headquarters in Richmond, Virginia. On my last day there, they gave me a really nice going away party with a delicious farewell cake and some wonderful parting gifts. And some people were crying and it was all I could do to not be crying myself. When the time came to leave the building, I went into Charley’s office to say goodbye. I realized how much he had meant to me, so, overcome by emotion, I, “California style”, gave him a big hug.
As I hugged him, he just stood there awkwardly and embarrassed, with his arms at his sides as I hugged him, nor returning my hug. Uh oh, now I was worried, was this a big mistake? Men didn’t hug men? This southern good ‘ol boy, Harley biker man, probably wasn’t taking this hug very well. So I quickly backed away, thanking him for the fruitful years I had enjoyed there, and then slinked out of there with the packages of my farewell gifts.
There is a whole lot of story that follows between that farewell and finally getting myself into Los Angeles, which will be worth some other stories. But meanwhile, let me say that one thing genuinely bad about Los Angeles is that it is very difficult to get a job here, especially if you have moved in from some other state. For one thing, the competition is fierce (it’s the same in New York City, as well). It seems that you have to pay some sort of dues, such as I did by doing a couple of years of “temp work” to prove that you really “mean it”, that you hadn’t come to L.A. with the dream of getting into the movies (which, by the way, I actually had come here for that, but that is a “whole nother” story, too). So many people cram into Los Angeles from some other place, do not manage to make a go of it (mostly your money runs out), and then bounce back out again to wherever they had come from. People hiring for “other” jobs want to make sure that it is this job you really want, not something to tide you over while you struggle to get that big movie part.
So I sure did my share of spreading around my resume, looking for a job. One of the places I went to was a medical supply company in the Los Angeles area. After all, I had already done three years of work in that field in North Carolina. The HR person interviewed me and studied my resume. She said that she wanted to check out my references and I was to call her a few days later to see what was up.
So a few days later, I did call her and she said, “I am sorry, the person who was leaving decided to stay on after all, so the position ends up being no longer open. It’s too bad, because you come highly recommended. They sure did rave about your performance at that medical company in North Carolina. The person I talked with said that we should snap you up, that they have maintained your cubical there as a shrine!”
I thought to myself, uh oh, who was that she talked with, giving out a rave review was explicitly against their rules! I told her that I really appreciated hearing that, would she mind telling me the name of the person she talked to. She said, “Oh, it was a man named Charley. He said that he had been your boss there.”
Charley! You rascal! You southern good ol’ boy Harley biker, I guess that goodbye hug from me was okay after all.
