It was a pretty insane day today at the workplace, what with the accidental death of a gentleman at Tent City and a record 130 people coming through our door, but perhaps the most bizarre incident was when an elderly gentleman arrived unannounced in my front lobby with a younger woman, a man carrying one heckuva big microphone and another man carrying a news video camera.
The man introduced himself as Andy Cordan from the That's Messed Up show on Channel 2 (WKRN) and began to explain to me why he was there while his cameraman set up a tripod in the middle of our crowded and noisy front room. It seems Cordan was there as an advocate for the elderly gentleman, who turned out to be a 73 year old Korean War veteran who had been told repeatedly by the VA that they had no record of his service.
Meanwhile, the VA was sending him correspondence and medals while telling him they had no record of him. The man had his dogtags, a picture of him in his uniform, and two medals in boxes addressed to him.
I told Andy and the group to give me a sec, as I thought this was a situation that deserved at the very least my boss Mary Ross, who I promptly went and retrieved.
Together we returned to the lobby, brought the group back to a conference room and proceeded to get to the bottom of the man's problem.
We took a quick look at his paperwork and called Linda over at the Regional VA office. In less than three minutes, using the man's dog tags and his social security number, we were able to determine what had happened and had corrected a problem that had caused these poor people grief for almost ten years.
Somehow, the man's info had been incorrectly entered into the computer system at the VA and when staffers went the traditional route of searching for the man's info, they were drawing a blank. The way we'd gotten around that was to use the man's service number, located on his dogtags.
I think Andy was pleasantly stunned, and I know the man and his daughter were as pleased as punch that we were able to help, and help quickly.
