Rant #2,737: Get Ready

Yesterday, I did something that I hadn’t had to do in a very long time.
 
I don’t regret the action one iota, because I have learned through my life that sometimes, this action is the only thing people understand.
 
I won’t go into graphic detail about the entire situation—as I said in previous Rants, I am not telling you the half of what my family and I have been going through now—but I will tell you enough that I think you will understand.
 
Dealing with agencies and organizations that are supposed to help you when you are in times of need is often a daunting task, and as they say, “the cure is often worse than the disease” when it comes to getting these groups to do what they are supposed to do, which is to help you.
 
Anyway, I have been trying my darndest to get some help from a human resources organization that is supposed to help people like myself and my family, but up until yesterday, I got nothing from them, just empty promises and baloney that anyone with a brain wouldn’t need a sharp knife—or even a dull one—to cut through.
 
I have called them any amount of times, but it always led to a dead end, even though I was assured that it wouldn’t.
 
Well, yesterday I had had enough.
 
I got through to an operator after about an hour wait—previous hold times were up to two hours, and once, after waiting about 90 minutes, I got cut off in the middle of my conversation and had to start all over again—and after explaining what I needed from them, I was getting the same replies that I received the other times I spoke with them over the past week or so.
 
And then I got a brainstorm.
 
Taking a page out of my past, I used a simple phrase to get them on the same page as me and to eventually get what I wanted from them.
 
I told them the following:
 
“If you do not help me today, I am going to get a lawyer and sue you.”
 
Period.
 
To the point.
 
I had forgotten about that tactic from my past, but it sure worked back then, and yes, it worked here, too.
 
Within moments, the operator took my email address, my phone number, and assured me that someone would call me on the phone later in the day to discuss the matter with me.
 
“Later in the day” amounted to about a half hour, and I received what I wanted from them within a few hours.
 
Now that’s service!
 
Look, dealing with these organizations can be extremely frustrating, but nobody wants to, or needs to, be treated as if they were an idiot, which I believe was the situation here.
 
And no one wants to be threatened with legal action, so when you do, they get scared, and eventually comply with your actions, and do it quickly.
 
I have done this before—not for a long time, though—and it works like a charm each and every time.
 
I hate to even bring this personal “ancient history” up to you, but I used to employ this action with some regularity when my daughter was younger and in school, because her mother refused to provide me with any information whatsoever on my daughter’s education, even though we had joint custody and thus, my ex was supposed to be doing this by the law.
 
Back in the 1990s, divorced fathers were looked at as something akin to criminals, and even though I had joint custody, I had few rights, or at least the rights I had were never enforced by the court.
 
So my ex would consistently stymie me from finding out any information about my daughter in school, and thus, I had an extremely difficult time finding out about and attending parent/teacher conferences, plays that she was in, even attending graduation ceremonies.
 
I had to do it all on my own, and this went through my daughter’s college level, believe it or not.
 
And when I explained to the various schools as to what was going on, they simply did not want to get involved.
 
I remember one teacher explained that since she considered me “the 26th parent in a 25 parent class,” she refused to see me during parent/teacher conferences, but after forcing the school to tell me when these conferences were and forcing the to put me on the visiting parent list with a threat of legal action, I showed up at the teacher’s classroom anyway.
 
This happened any number of times, and I had to force myself into the class to speak to my daughter’s teachers.
 
One time, my daughter was appearing in a play as a background player, and my ex refused to provide a ticket for me, so I called the school, which told me that the room was already filled to capacity and that “I should have gotten a ticket from my daughter’s mother," and they could not provide me with one.
 
The threat of legal action led them to actually provide me with a chair to sit on during the performance. I guess they found some room for me.
 
This situation also happened during graduations—from grammar school all the way through undergraduate school—and somehow, the threat of legal proceedings always got me what I deserved to have gotten in the first place.
 
So I used that tactic for the very first time in years yesterday, and I guess that even in this COVID-laced world, it is a tactic that still works.
 
And I am not happy to say that. You would have thought that the world would have changed in the past 10 or 11 years or so since I threatened legal action to one of my daughter’s schools for the final time--to get tickets to her undergraduate school graduation--but it hasn’t.
 
Sorry to report that, but I know my rights as a citizen and as a person, and if I have to use that tactic again to get what I want, need and deserve … well, let’s just say that it is in my toolbox.