Why I Would Make The Worst Teacher, Or Pharmacy Manager, Ever

You may have picked up by now that I'm not much of a people person. This extends not only to customers and my interactions with folks in day to day life, but to my fellow employees as well. I generally have 2 rules for the cashiers, techs, and other assorted staff under my supervision in the happy pill room:

1) Keep yourself busy.

2) Stay out of my way.

I can be flexible on rule number 1, but number 2 is written in stone. This usually puts me in pretty good stead with the people I work with, as I've been lucky enough to by and large have staff who knew their jobs well and appreciated the autonomy my anti-socialness gave them. Sometimes though I run into problems. Because of the way we fill prescriptions, the order in which labels print out is not the order in which they were entered into the system. This means at the end of the day we have to go through the day's prescriptions, sort them into numerical order, and put them away in the file cabinet. The other day I was working with someone who was attempting this for the first time. I gave her the day file box with the instructions "Just put them in order and file them by hundreds" , thinking this was about all the training someone would need for the task. I was wrong.

A few minutes later I was presented with a pile of prescriptions in what appeared to be random order. I think they were in a different order then when the job was started, but what system was used was beyond my comprehension. I said something like "No, you just need to put them in order"

I was then asked a bizarre question about what to do with the "ten twenty ones and the ten twenty twos"

It was then I realized. This person could not understand they were to put little slips of paper in order. That 10 was bigger than 9 was bigger than 8........and try as I might, I was unable to get the point across to them.

The moment I decided it would be easier to just do it myself was the same moment I decided to vote "yes" for the preschool funding initiative on next months ballot.