Who do you trust?

I spent a good hour in the chair at the Dentist's office Monday afternoon. As I sat there I thought about polls I've seen measuring the amount of trust people place in medical professionals. It dawned on me that I've never seen a poll about trust in dentists.

This is interesting to me because my experience is that dentists are among the least trustworthy people on the planet. I had two dentists in Austin that tried to get me to agree to extensive, unnecessary work. Our son had a dentist in Austin who billed both me and my insurance company. They then refused to send me my money back until I had called them three times and gotten ugly with them on the phone. Remarkably, the office manager for that dentist told me that they never re-fund money in cases where they double bill unless the patient is both insistent and persistent. Now in Colorado, we've stopped sending our kids to a pediatric dentist and instead are taking them to our dentist because we discovered the pediatric dentist was practicing fraudulent billing.

So, who do you trust? I should say that our dentist here in Colorado is fantastic and everything is above board. But I've found them to be the exception to the rule.

Stupid Stupid Stupid

I went to Wolf Camera yesterday to pick up some picture's I'd taken with my old school, 35 mm film camera.

The guy at Wolf explained to me that their machine that develops pictures is down and that they had called my home phone to tell me and that they'd call me again when my pictures were developed.

I got home, looked at the phone and noticed the voice mail notice light was NOT blinking. Then I looked at the caller ID. I hadn't gotten a phone call all day.

So the guy at Wolf had lied. And what a stupid lie it was. The lie initially made me feel really good about Wolf Camera. I was impressed with their ability to provide quality customer service. But when I realized that they had never called, it made me feel horrible about their company.

What a stupid lie.

UPDATE: I just spoke with the store manager on the phone. It ends up that the employee (the photo technician who doesn't normally do customer service) who was given the task of making the calls didn't make them but told the other employees that she had completed all of them. As a result, Wolf Camera lied to a bunch of people yesterday because their customer service team believed that people had really been called.

So here's my take. This was a case of bad management. Give customer relations jobs to people who are good at dealing with other people and who enjoy that kind of work. I know the sales staff was probably busy selling cameras and dealing with in-store customers. I also know that Wolf had a photo technician sitting around with nothing to do after the machine went down. But asking her to make customer calls was a mistake. It was a job she was not able to perform. Good managers put their employees in a position to succeed. I don't think Wolf Camera did that.