East Bay SPCA Veterinary Clinic

I have been looking for a decent vet ever since the Berkeley Humane Society Clinic closed to the public. I thought maybe the SPCA wouldn’t be as much of a ripoff as a private clinic, but unfortunately, it seems to be just as bad. I haven’t got complaints about the medical care — the doctors have been nice and the assistants pleasant— but my dog’s teeth seemed to be in bad shape, so I took her in to get some advice. They charged me $ 40 for an office visit, so that they could tell me that if I paid $ 1100, they would clean her teeth so that they could SEE if she needed any dental work done. I was pretty pissed off. I wouldn’t spend eleven hundred dollars to get my own teeth cleaned, let alone the dog’s.
Yesterday I asked them to call in my dog’s two regular prescriptions to the Costco pharmacy. This morning when I got to Costco, of course, they had not called the prescriptions in. (This is probably the third time this has happened, and I always ask if they can do it, and they always assure me that it’s no problem, and it’s always a problem.) The Costco pharmacist then faxed them a request to phone in the prescriptions, and asked me to check back. I checked back almost an hour later, and there had been no response. I called them and explained this all, and said that I needed to pick up the prescriptions today. «Well,» says the clinic receptionist, speaking slowly and enunciating carefully, as if to a retarded child. «Your prescription isn’t ready because the doctor hasn’t phoned it in yet.» «Right,» say I, «that’s why I’m calling you. That’s why I called yesterday, and why they faxed you this morning. When is the doctor going to phone it in?» «Well,» she says, «You didn’t call until yesterday afternoon. You’ll just have to wait.» «Well,» I say, «I can’t hang around Costco all day long — how long will I have to wait?» «Well, I don’t know ma’am,» she says, very snotty, as if I’m asking her to foretell the future. I lost it at that point: I really do not understand how a clinic that has the nerve to charge you forty bucks to tell you it will cost eleven hundred bucks to clean a dog’s teeth gets off getting shitty with me about phoning in a prescription. How difficult can it be to phone in a prescription?