When this patient walked up to the receptionist to try and make an appointment they were told that appointments could be made over the phone only, so they whipped out their phone and called the doctor's office right in front of the receptionist.
Bureaucracies are an inertant force and dealing with them can be like dredging sludge off the ocean floor. Their entire existence serves to slow penetration and discourage inquiries from advancing any further than they need to. In favor of the receptionist, it's pretty easy to postulate that they were simply maliciously complying with some sort of KPI or target attached to appointments taken over the phone. They probably got reprimanded for missing phone calls in favor of helping people in person, and this was their response to dealing with that "issue."
I've had similar things happen in retail. Missed phone calls are always a statistic that is tracked but what management doesn't realize is a missed phone calls are usually more indicative of how busy and understaffed you are than anything else. It's not as if you'd just ignore a phone if you have nothing else to do. But, customers in store will always get priority. Have you seen how people behave if you ignore them in favor of picking up a phone?
When faced with this argument management has no answer and the entire argument around "increasing missed phone calls" fizzles out to something along the lines of "Well, just figure it out."
This thread was posted on Reddit's r/maliciouscompliance subreddit by u/Revolutionary_Ant209, who shared their story to the delighted reception of readers.
"I absolutely love this. Did you have this face while on the call? ಠ_ಠ," replied buttgers. "I hope you had this glare while on the phone. I thought there was a call center handling their scheduling, but maybe they wanted all appointments on the phone as they're recording the staff to ensure they're nice to patients."
"Yeah, I had a face somewhat like that. It might be that. Given her lack of manners, I could see why maybe they wanted to record her calls and interactions with patients," said the original poster, offering another explanation for the weird rule.
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