(WARNING: LONG POST)
Hey guys. First off, thanks for everything you all have done. Especially you Dave. With all that you have to do, you still help us peon's with our personal problems. That's a class act right there. Anyways, here is the situation.
My wife and I own a janitorial business here in Texas. We have a few employees and clean multiple office buildings, including 4 clinics for a hospital district (or atleast we DID). We've cleaned these particular clinics for 2 years already and have never had an issue, that is until about a month ago.
Apparently, the hospital district recently had a vote on building a new hospital (which passed) and asked all surrounding clinics to make cuts on their spending in order to help fund the addition. To add to this "number crunch", one of the clinics we cleaned had just lost a key doctor to a rival district and was no longer receiving the income from him. Therefore, cuts needed to be made and, as anyone in my business knows, the first cuts are usually made in the luxury area, which is where we are. Well, the contract we made with them stated that in order for them to end our agreement early, it either had to be due to a performance issue (in which they had to give us a 2 week period to correct the issue and, if not corrected, then they could initiate the termination clause) or they had to buy out a portion of the remaining contract. So of course, they needed to find a reason to terminate us due to a performance issue in order to avoid buying us out.
So here we come to the incident that happened about a month ago. The clinic in question has special bins next to each office desk called a "shred bin". These shred bins hold confidential customer information such as medical records and billing information. These bins usually go weeks before actually being emptied out in their shredder and are NEVER put away at the end of the day. Therefore, they are always out in the open where any of my crew can have access to them. It has been this way for the entire 2 years we have worked for them.
Now to their credit, the bins are marked as "shred - to not throw away" and are also identified by the fact that they do not have trash can liners like the other trash bins do. But again, they are never emptied for weeks (and sometimes months) at a time and are never put away before we arrive, therefore being fully accessible to us.
Okay, like I was saying earlier, a month ago one of the doctors at the clinic in question decided to part ways with the hospital. The day he left, the clinic decided to do some reorganizing in order to take advantage of some of the extra space. My staff noticed this that night when they went to go clean. They went about their usual way (as they have been for the past 2 years) and completed the job as usual.
Well apparently, the next day the clinic realized that one of the shred bins was empty. So they immediately informed the chief financial officer of the hospital about the violation. In turn, the CFO tried to contact me via e-mail, stating that the documents that had been thrown out needed to be retrieved within 48 hours and she needed to be informed when it was done or else they were going to be liable. There was just one big problem. I never received the e-mail because it had been inaccessible to me for almost a week due to internet provider issues I was having at the time.
So you're probrably wondering, "Este, why didn't you call and inform the hospital that your e-mail was down? Don't you think they would need to know that?"
Yes, I do realize that this was a mishap on my part. But one thing that most people don't know is that this particular CFO was the type of person who would just so happen to call me on EVERY SINGLE ISSUE THAT EVER HAPPENED AT ANYTIME.
Trash bin wasn't emptied? I would get a call.
Mirror not cleaned right? Call.
Floor sticky? Call.
Dust bunny found in the most obscure corner of an empty office? Call.
(Okay, I made the last one up, but you get my point.)
So yes, I figured that if there was any serious situation that needed to be handled ASAP, I would receive a call from them. Therefore, I figured it wasn't necessary to inform them of my e-mail being inaccessible to me. My bad.
So the CFO sends an e-mail to me the day after the supposed incident happens and informs me that this issue needs to be addressed within 48 hours due to the consequences that could occur if it wasn't handled. You want to know when I found out about this?
Two friggin' weeks later. When my internet is back up. And I check my e-mail. Two weeks after the CFO sent it...
You get where I'm going with this?
If you have a serious, time sensitive issue that MUST be handled due to the serious implications it could have on your company if it isn't and you don't receive a response to the e-mail you sent from the people who would be handling it (and the deadline is fast approaching), what would you do? What would YOU DO?
YOU WOULD FRIGGIN' CALL THOSE DAMN PEOPLE!
You wanna know what these people did? They sent ONE e-mail. That's it.
No phone call 24 hours later. No call 48 hours later (when the deadline was reached). NOT EVEN A FOLLOW UP E-MAIL THE ENTIRE 2 WEEKS THAT MY INTERNET WAS OUT.
Nope. For this extremely important, time sensitive, consequence rendering issue that needed to be addressed within 48 hours, they sent ONE E-MAIL.
You wanna know what really happened? They found their reason to get out of the contract without buying us out.
So anyways, like a good little soldier, when I finally did get the e-mail, I called the hospital to discuss the issue with the CFO. However, by the time I called, they had already initiated the termination clause due to my lack of response to this serious violation. I tried to explain the situation to them, however they were pretty convinced that we were at fault and there was nothing we could do. The certified letter was already in the mail, and we were to be dismissed in 1 month (as per the performace termination clause).
I've gone through a few things to rectify the matter with them as peacefully as possible. I've even requested an exit interview in order to explain our side of things to them (which they denied me of). I've tried to defend my employees, telling them that in the 2 years that we've been cleaning they have never thrown out a shred bin, so why would they do so now? What proof do they have? How do they know that one of THEIR employees didn't throw it out accidentally, since they had reorganized that day? How do WE know that it even happened?
Each and every question they have refused to discuss with us. So guess what? I'm done being peaceful. They wanna say we got terminated due to violating the HIPAA act? Well see about that.
So that explains the situation. While I believe I have a case already, it would be of great benefit if I could prove that they were in violation of HIPPA already by having those documents out in the open when we would arrive. There should never have been an opportunity for us to throw those documents out in the first place (if we even did). And here is another zinger...
The day that the documents were "supposedly" thrown out was on a Tuesday. The trash truck that picks up that particular clinic's trash comes every Monday morning. If the hospital had called us the moment the deadline had passed to find out why we hadn't responded yet, it would have been sometime on Friday. Guess where I would have been the moment I would have found out?
Knee deep in dumpster, with a WHOLE WEEKEND to retrieve all the documents.
But nope, all I got was ONE FRIGGIN' E-MAIL.
Must have been some "serious" issue, huh?
