On Consumerism: Vaccine Odyssey: Part II

By Arthur Vidro
By Arthur Vidro

The Eagle Times of March 27 contained the odyssey of how I secured vaccination appointments for my wife and myself. That column reported we had vaccine #1 scheduled for mid-April and vaccine #2 scheduled for early May.

Both appointments would be here in Claremont, at the community college.

Things turned out rather differently than planned.

A few days before vaccine #1 was to take place, the newspapers carried a small piece about the relocation of the shots. Instead of at Claremont Community College, it would be in an empty storefront in Newport.

Less convenient, but doable.

The annoying part is that neither the state nor the company contracted to run the vaccination process bothered to notify us of the change. If I hadn’t seen the item in the newspaper, we would have arrived at the wrong place and in the wrong town, perhaps forfeiting our shots.

But we got the shot on the correct day, albeit in Newport. There was a table of officials by the exit to help people sign up for their second shots. I almost didn’t stop there, since we already had scheduled our second shots. Or so I thought.

But I’ve learned in this age of computers to double-check everything, especially when you don’t have paper documentation. What you think exists, might have been erased. So I wanted to verify that the entity giving the shots was on the same page we were on.

The folks at the checkout table told us no, we did not have a second appointment made. And the date we thought we had for the second appointment, they told us, would have been too soon after the first appointment to be allowed.

So we scheduled May 22 – last Saturday – for the follow-up shot.

But during the final week of April, a woman named Morgan phoned from the state and said our appointment was needlessly too far off, and she wanted to give us an appointment on May 15 instead. Would that be all right?

We said it was all right. I asked if being given the May 15 appointment meant our May 22 appointment was being canceled. She said yes. I asked for, and received, a phone number to get back to her, just in case something came up.

So at bedtime May 14 we set the alarm clock and in the morning headed off to Newport. To be met by a locked door. The place was closed. A sign on the door said they would re-open on May 17. There was no explanation of why they were closed. But there was a phone number to call if you had questions.

Misery loves company, so we were comforted when a couple from Lempster joined us in confusion at the locked door. They, too, had been told they had appointments for May 15.

When we got home, I dialed the phone number that had appeared on the Closed sign. Nobody picked up, but a machine from the private entity administering the shots (Keady Family Practice’s On-Site Medical) said if you leave your name and number someone will get back to you.

I left our name and number, explained our appointment with a locked facility, and asked how we could reschedule, or had they exhausted their vaccine supply?

They never phoned us back.

Eventually I phoned the number provided by Morgan when she had rescheduled our shots, and reached a state agency. I related what had happened and asked for an explanation.

Nobody there had information about the facility being closed even though some of us had been told we had appointments.

But the woman I spoke to – her name was Elizagh – looked through her system and told us no, we did not have appointments for May 15. I reiterated that Morgan had advanced our appointment by a week and perhaps I could speak to Morgan? The woman knew Morgan, said Morgan wasn’t there, and repeated that no appointment was in the system for us for May 15.

Maybe the appointment somehow hadn’t stuck in the system. Or maybe the private agency administering the shots canceled all appointments for that date without bothering to tell all of us who had appointments. That’s speculation. Too often I resort to speculation, but that’s what consumers have to do when they’re not important enough to be told the real story.

But wait – Elizagh insisted our appointment for May 22 was still on the books, so no rescheduling was needed. We just had to show up – again – and honor the appointment that Morgan had supposedly canceled on our behalf.

So we returned on May 22 and got our second jabs. The only obstacle was that the woman who was supposed to jab my wife wouldn’t take her eyes from her computerized device and kept demanding to know if my wife had filled out an online survey after our first shots. My wife fled to the table I was at, where a kinder medical pro injected both of us without mentioning surveys of any kind.

Note: Filling out an online survey is not a requirement for inoculation. Too bad one of the workers didn’t seem to realize that.

Thus, another odyssey ended.

Twenty-five years from now, each of us will have vivid personalized memories of the horrible Covid years: the illnesses and deaths; the economic fallout; the limited ability to perform surgeries; the wearing of masks; the various stimulus packages; categorizing which businesses or people were “essential”; and the juvenile politicization of what should have been a merely medical matter.

But the vivid memory in my declining years will be the nightmare of having to arrange for both vaccination appointments. I’ll always shudder at that memory.