It may come as a shock, but it turns out that we are graduating people from medical and nursing schools, and seeing them hired for office jobs, in droves, without making sure that they are able to read.
I myself, though you'd think I'd be inured to the phenomenon after having experienced it for years, maintain a certain level of incredulity about it. Every time I contact some kind of medical provider, insurance company, or similar organization by their secure HIPAA-compliant email portal and receive a reply, I have some shred of hope within me that their answer will reveal that they are capable of communicating through text, both in that they will have absorbed whatever I wrote to them and that they will be equipped to respond in kind. But in practice, this beautiful dream is the exception, not the rule.
They want me to call them on the phone.
They want me to do this even if I inform them that I am hard of hearing (it's meant to be an illiterate-person-friendly rendering of "audio processing impaired") and cannot have a telephone conversation unless it's actually important enough that I am having it with an emergency services dispatcher or maybe Poison Control (under which circumstance I will go into debt with myself and ask for things to be repeated seven times and cry if I have to but I'm not going to do that for anything else). They want me to do this even if I am writing to the same presumable office, literal or distributed, that houses the phones. It is somehow impossible for the same people who normally man the phone bank to have some of their attention allocated to answering written messages, or at least answering them in a way that involves reading them, i.e. with any content other than copy-pasted Help Center text which shares one point four keywords with my original message, followed by "please call us at the following number during these hours with any further questions."
Sometimes I run into someone who can read! I got a letter in the postal mails not too long ago, which said: "I understand that you advised calling is not an option for you, but I am required to share the phone number with you." That one even referred to a text chat option I could try, but didn't include directions to get there. I guess because the directions wouldn't be a string of 7-12 digits with optional hyphens and parentheses? So I didn't find this helpful at all, but they weren't required (by law? by corporate diktat?) to be helpful, they were only required to provide me with a phone number.
AIs are now good at many things some of the time, but they are apparently not so good and so efficient at phone calls that I can get one to make phone calls for me at a lower price than I can get a human being to do it, most especially because when I get another human being to make a phone call for me in a medical capacity, whoever they manage to raise on the other end of the line usually wants me to hop on the call and take over for them, no matter how beseechingly I ask, in person at the doctor's office, to please allow my spouse to be my phone proxy.
Once my spouse asked a provider, "What would you do if she were deaf?" And, demonstrating that we also do not reliably graduate people for these workplaces with a firm command of spoken language, the reply was: "Good news, we found you a doctor who knows sign language!" - for, of course, future in-person appointments, which I handle in the usual way as long as nobody has too thick an accent, not for the immediate phone-related issue. I think what actually deaf people actually do is use an interpreter service. But while I took a sign language class once I retain very little of the content and would not benefit from it.
This is not a personal health information security issue. I have gotten HIPAA certified - twice, actually, funny story, my employer at the time changed which certification they wanted me to get at just the right moment! - and HIPAA is there to protect patients, not providers. Providers may of course reasonably respond to the threat of being sued for failing to meet their obligations to patients with conservatism. (Though I wish they'd be equally skittish about my empty threats to invoke the ADA.) I do not sincerely expect them to offer me a tickbox that says "CLICK HERE to have your medical information released to the public internet and live national television BUT you never have to fill out another for and we will stop asking you to call us" even though I'd click that with great abandon. But this is why they have the compliant email portals. I get opaque alerts that Someone Said Something in my normal Gmail inbox, I go click through and sign in, everything's sewn up tight and they can put all kinds of fun facts about my organs in there worry-free, and the Something that Someone Said is:
i share this issue and find it phenomenally distressing. i chose a dr. specifically because they have a decently functional portal which allows online appointment scheduling but i now find that if i want an “issue” appointment rather than a “routine” appointment, they will only schedule by phone. they send me all manner of text messages but cannot receive texts. they put my private info in the portal but i cannot respond there. my spouse is my emergency contact and is my formally appointed healthcare proxy but it ranges from big hassle to impossible for them to have medical phone conversations on my behalf.
I want to get into a fight but less in a “I hate you” way and more in a “I want to feel your skin against mine as we push and pull each other till we end up on the floor out of breath” kinda way
unironically i think we need to bring back computer labs because APPARENTLY some people WERENT taught basic computer literacy and internet safety in school
things about computers/the internet i think kids should be formally taught in schools because theyre important to know and the amount of soon to be grown adults i know who know NOTHING about any of these is quite frankly almost all of them (and resources to learn if you dont know these things, because its never to late to get better with computers)
how to troubleshoot by yourself when you have a technical problem
what common file types are
some very basics on how to use ""developer tools"" on your computer (because i cant think of a better way to refer to them) like task manager and command prompt (and their mac equivalents, terminal and activity monitor ofc)
how to read and understand a privacy policy and what your personal data is, as well as what it being collected actually means and steps you can take to keep it private
how to understand terms of service
(hey. if you have trouble with reading legalese and worry about being able to understand these policies anyways, here's a site that gives basic summaries of privacy policies and ToS)
what a cookie actually is
internet privacy and your digital footprint!! seriously i dont know why we stopped teaching people that they shouldnt be putting their entire real identity online in a world where your online actions can ruin you irl
basic safety measures like antivirus software (and why you should use it or if the built in one on windows or mac is enough for you) and backing up your computer (also a mac guide)
common keyboard shortcuts (and on mac)
as an additional note: things i think everyone should know on computers and the internet but schools may bit hesitant to teach about for whatever moral/legal standards schools pretend to operate on
vpns and adblockers! (btw for most of these where you can pay for things im purposefully not recommending any specific software but seriously just use ublock origin for an adblocker)
how to not get a virus while pirating something
what a temporary email is and when to use one
red flags that you shouldn't trust a website (and how to quickly check the security of a site)
what javascript on a website does and how to disable it to get around paywalls
ok one last addition! if you want to take it one level higher, i think learning the very basics of at least one programming language is good for people. it makes computers less scary and it makes you feel very cool, and a lot of people get discouraged about it because it seems overly complicated and hard to learn outside a formal classroom setting, so heres some resources for learning the very basics of python (because i consider it the easiest language to learn and knowing one language will make it easier to learn others)
an online compiler so you dont need to download anything or worry about running code directly on your computer if that makes you nervous
a basic video guide to introduce you to python and walk you through beginner steps
a guide to some syntax and commands you should know (this was literally my lifeline in my first CS class)
some performance tasks to give you things to code to practice and assess yourself
I took a lot of Shakespeare in school. I love Shakespeare. When someone knows how to perform it, and not just recite it, wow. It gets me in the guts.
Knowing that, my wife sent me this video, and holy hannah, did it hit hard. For those who don't know, this monologue was from a play called Sir Thomas More. The monologue itself is attributed to Shakespeare, the play though, had many authors due to repeated censorship, impracticality and revisions. This play was rarely performed because there's something like 50 speaking roles, and not a lot of them were easily recycled characters, so you couldn't just chuck on a different costume and be someone else. Just for reference, I think most Shakespeare plays capped out at around 20 max, with several of them able to be swapped actors.
But that is just context. What Ian McKellen performs in this scene is magic. Absolutely. I was in tears watching this. He knows and loves these words and is able to derive meaning and understanding.
And of course, it is incredibly timely.
The idea is that the "strangers" (or immigrants) are unwelcome in England, but Englishmen have the expectation that they should be welcomed elsewhere. Not only that, but the speech demands empathy for the immigrants and the rejection of the lawlessness of the civil unrest of a mob.
I have watched this clip probably ten times today.
I live in Canada. We like to think of ourselves as opposed to ideas like immigration intolerance and ultra-conservative beliefs. And compared to some, that may be true.
Truth is, we aren't immune. So many people out there are in that mob, shouting "the strangers should be removed," just as other nations in this world are doing.
And I'm sorry for it.
I just want people to open their hearts and hold people close. Nobody is a stranger. Everyone should be welcome.
gorgeous and masterful and also something about how hearing things in new words lets them slide past the bits of you that have become jaded without you even realizing it
All Manner of Things @easymiracles - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
