On Friday my boss gave me and the two really good billers at work new marching orders ... which turned out to be the thing we started off on: We are to go back to punching in claims, hour after hour, at least for the whole week.
He saw this coming. He asked for more people to help out with this, what is the front end of the billing process, so we wouldn't be so far behind at this point in the season. I don't totally recollect what our manpower was last year, but it seemed as if, after starting off with just me and the other guy for what seemed to be two weeks, we ramped up very quickly, and I think we had nine people going for the rest of the project.
I think our problem is the labor. We have had an absurd amount of turnover; five people either left this job or got fired for not performing up to snuff. I could be wrong, but last year we lost one person rather quickly, and another guy (a real solid dude, a guy whom I asked questions to because he did the project the year prior) just upped and vanished by around Thanksgiving. Of the five "departed ones" this year, I know of one girl who just fucking up and quit after one day, which sucks because she didn't even have the decency to tell us. But the others I think got the hook, some more quickly than others, all possibly without enough time to nail this work down. What we are doing is hard because it involves so much minute detail that isn't logical. Most of it is entering codes that no layperson would understand. But apparently my boss' bosses believe they should be up to doing 300 claims a day after, like, two days, which is bullshit. They fail to understand that the learning curve is steep, and they're getting the hook much earlier than they should.
Moreover, and again, Buddha bless them, two of them are just awful. I and the two really good ones help out later down the assembly line of these claims, where we go over them with a fine-toothed comb to make absolutely sure the information we're billing them is correct, and the work from these two fucking blows. And they're barely getting any better. But they are absolutely obsessed with reaching this 300 day after day. Work this shoddy for this long should be enough to get them fired. I don't want either of them to be fired, but that's the truth. So why are they still here? They reach 300, I guess. I really thought that once they reached that goal once they'd be fine till there was no work left to do. But on Friday that is what my boss emphasized, which surprised me. They thus will continue to pound through claims, and they will either skip over or punch in information that is wrong, and once we get back to doing the shit that actually gets this company paid, we essentially will be doing these claims again. Why do these guys keep people who do, like, 325 of them when only 200 are decent while cutting someone who may barely reach 250 but are careful enough to do 225 of them clean?
And now this 300 edict boomerangs back on me because, once again, I'm fucking frightened I won't reach it. I think I reached it only one time, and I made damn sure my boss saw that so he would think I would be able to do this every day and thus I'd be good enough to stay employed. But now that we're back on the grind again, I'm scared that I'm fall short every single fucking day. And I might. Then what? Will I be able to just spend my time compiling invoices and sending out bills, or ... will I be fired for not crushing 300 shitty claims? My boss showed me that he has a spreadsheet that tracks our work. I knew there had to be a way for him to keep tabs on us, but a spreadsheet?!
This week is going to be a horrible one.
No comments:
Post a Comment