Friday, October 14, 2011

Research - Is this woman crazy?

As a writer of contemporary fiction, I like for my stories to be as realistic as possible.  Sometimes that means having to do research.

Yesterday I was going through some edits that were sent back to me on a story. My editor was questioning part of one of my character's histories. And although I was fairly sure that what I had written was fine, I wasn't one hundred percent sure so research was in order.

For this particular research, I needed to call an insurance company. Now, let me tell you, calling anyone you don't know and who doesn't know you and asking for information ...well it's tricky. You never know what kind of response you're going to get.

In this particular case, I was given a different number to call as the person said they didn't know. She was nice, but I've got a feeling I made 'water cooler' talk for the next day.

When I called the number the woman had given me, after getting transferred, I reached a gentleman who, while again was nice enough, was left rather speechless. He had no idea how to answer my question either and ended up transferring me to a team lead in the claims department.

In the end, I had to leave a message for this team lead. Twenty-four hours later, I'm still waiting for a call back. Will I get one? Probably not. My guess is that they will pass it off as some crazy lady.

With my background in customer service, I'm used to calling people for out of the way things in order to solve a problem. This, however, had to be one of the strangest.

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