One of my favourite things is when someone doesn’t try to rip me off. So today I got to have one of my least favourite experiences, when I visited the ‘Dental Hygienist’.
Remember when I said this?
To celebrate I bought 4 bottles of merlot, and booked myself in for a horrible ripoff of a tooth polishing session with the "hygienist."
— June 2, 2005
Turns out I’m clairvoyant.
Cleaning of the old teeth is something that dentists used to be capable of, but when they flicked the job off to a considerably less skilled labourer, dentists didn’t drop their prices, did they? And it’s not like the less skilled hygienist is cheap, today I paid $135 for a single hour.
Now, if she’d actually done the job as I expected I would have sucked it up and said "look at how shiny my lovely teeth are," but she didn’t.
And it went wrong right from the beginning – well, that’s not true, the receptionist ([name removed]) is a lovely professional and charming young woman, and she was great – so maybe it’s more accurate to say it went wrong from right when I sat down in the hygienists chair.
She introduced herself, of course ("Hi, I’m Name Removed ,") in the rough English of what sounded like an Eastern European, but her name card looks more like, maybe Spanish or Portuguese or something like that… Then proceeded to tell me that the X-Rays I’d just had done a couple of days before indicated that I’d have to have at least two visits with her… "Hold on," I said, "I haven’t had an X-Ray taken in over 6 years."
"Oh, fuck," she seemed to think, "I’ve been caught out in my most popular lie, trying to scam more money out of this sucker." She then says "Ahh, 6 years, then it’ll be even worse, won’t it? So we should book another appointment now."
"Don’t you think it’d be a good idea for you to look in my mouth before we book any more time?" I asked, a hint of incredulity creeping into my voice. "Oh, you want to do it that way around? Ok," she finally agrees.
Anyway, we get down to business, if you know what I mean, she gives me a super nasty mouthwash, if you know what I mean, she clips on a bib, if you know what I mean, lowers the chair into an almost upside down position, if you know what I mean, then proceeds to scrape the plaque off my healthy and strong, if perhaps a little unclean, teeth.
I feel like something a bit funny is going on, when she stops at the middle of my jaw, then goes back and does the same teeth she’s just done. Then she gets out the instrument of satan himself, the super high-speed water pick-cum-grinding head… Again, she only does half my jaw, and then goes back to do bits she’s already ripped the hell out of already. Then she does some of my top teeth, then she goes back down the bottom and does teeth she’s already done again.
Then she decides it’s time to take a break, and thatI can relax my jaw… I clamber up out of my still upside down chair and spit a mouth full of nasty bloody spit in the bowl, then relax again and watch what she’s doing.
I’ve been known to waste time at a computer, if you know what I mean, so I can recognise it when I see it. The aimless scrolling up and down of text fields. The incredibly slow typing. She takes fully 5 minutes (there was a clock on the wall, which had robotic arms that reached down and tore twenties out of my lovely Italian made leather wallet, then set them alight and used them to light expensive Cuban torpedos, which it then failed to enjoy, just letting them burn down to pathetic, smelly little stubs.) to type out, 1 fingered – and I noticed she’d taken off her gloves for this, and was pleased that she took the ‘hygiene’ part of her title seriously – a single fucking line of a text.
She was done with that, and pulled some new gloves from a sterile packet, now this is an important point, these are lovely new sterile gloves she’s just put on, so now she pushes the light out of the way, crouches down low on the ground and removes what looks like a pressure bottle full of… drainings… From the bottom of what I guess might have been the suction machine. She takes it and pours it out in the sink, then screws the now empty pressure bottle back into the bottom of the machine… Now, without missing a beat, she grabs her instruments and proceeds to fondle around inside me lovely soft lips. ("Holy fucking bacteria," I thought, "now this is definitely going on my website, what the fuck is this woman doing?")
There are just 20 minutes left in our appointment, and I’m now feeling detached and helpless, aware that she’s been wasting time going over the same teeth over and over again. She do some scraping or whatevering on the top, then go back to do a tooth that was already (painfully) done.
This proceeded for another 20 minutes, then she gave me a brochure "Taking care of your teeth" or whatever the fuck, I saw a great big Oral B logo on the cover, opened it up, and there you go – turns out that to take care of your teeth, you’d better buy an Oral B, I put it back down on her bench and walked out to the reception, where the receptionist was once again lovely and helpful, I considered making a fuss, but instead told her that I was really disappointed, and that I’d only make the (now mandatory, as she made bloody sure she only did half my fucking mouth) second appointment if it was with a different "hygienist."
So, 6 years ago I had a good cleaning, both sides of my top and bottom jaws, and a good old polish, and it cost about $60 (as far as I recall.) this time, I’ve paid over twice that much already for LESS THAN HALF THE FUCKING SERVICE.
I’m not going to name my dental practice or the hygienist at this stage, as I’m going to send them an email and give them a chance to make right, if they don’t do that, I’ll tell you exactly who to avoid.
If I have to pay what I’m now expecting – $270 for a tooth cleaning – I’m going to go completely fucking moonbat ballistic.
And no, I didn’t want to post this, I was planning to sing Pizza Hut’s praises — they’ve done something super cool. You’ll see.