Sunday, August 13, 2006

Customer Service = More Business. A Filthy Lie

Sunday evenings mean a mad rush for drugs in the last hour I am open for business. Sunday mornings are sometimes spent on my ass reading magazines. It's been this way for years, start Sunday drinking coffee looking over paperwork, end Sunday slamming the door in someone's face. If you don't understand why the store doesn't then open and/or close later, then you obviously don't have a degree in business. I don't have a degree in business either, which means I don't get it, but since all I really ask of my employer is that their paychecks don't bounce, I've never sweated it all that much.

Today was no exception to the mad Sunday evening rush rule. About a half hour before closing time, I'm manning the pill room all by myself with 10 prescriptions whose owners have decided to wait anxiously for them to be filled. Sux, but I've been there before. Last Sunday actually. The next guy who comes up to the counter is looking to have a prescription transferred from a pharmacy about 10 minutes away. A prescription that has already been filled, waiting there to be picked up. He had never been to my store before. He didn't have his insurance card with him. You can imagine how much I wanted his business.

I explain to him clearly that there was no way it was physically possible for me to have the prescription filled before closing time. The best that was going to happen was me taking what information I could get from him and leaving it to be done sometime tomorrow. He wants to go ahead with it. The best he can tell me is that the prescription was for some sort of eye drop.

10 minutes away the eyedrops are pleading, "Oh pppplllleeeeeaaassssseeeee come and get me....your insurance has already paid for me......I am so eager to come home with you."

I am not nice to this man by any definition of the word. No smile, no welcoming tone in my voice, not the slightest indication I value him any more than dirt. Turns out the prescription is for Ciprofloxacin, an antibiotic. The moron has an eye infection and is going to wait until sometime tomorrow to begin treatment. The prescription was READY TO BE PICKED UP at that very moment.

Did I mention I wasn't nice to this person? I believe the way I phrased it was "if you insist I'll see what I can do, but if I were you I would go to the other store and pick it up now." I did everything but beat him with a stick and still there he was, digging in his wallet for the non-existent insurance card perfectly willing to let his eye fester overnight.

What on earth makes someone put up with this kind of service? Had he no self respect? Was it the store's buy one get one free special on Corn Nuts that week that attracted him like flypaper, or was it the dollar off large boxes of flypaper? I could only conclude that he was doing this solely to irritate me. It was the only explanation that made any sense. "Sneer at me will you you smart ass pharmacist? Well you can just play insurance card detective then"

Since he had an Arab surname, there was only one rational thing I could do. I called The Department of Homeland Security and claimed he was a terrorist. The last I saw of him he was being led away in leg irons. Perhaps the eye drops will be ready by the time he makes bail, but I wouldn't count on it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Today a competitor called me to give me a transfer for a patinet he refused to fill for because she has a foul mouth. Thanks for that. Then she called to say she wanted all her Rxs transferred and her son's. When my tech asked her to spell her son's name she said if we couldn't fill her prescriptions without giving her attitude, she'd find someone who will. We wished her good luck with that.

I despise people.