Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Highlights From Friday's Pill Counting Action.

They will fight like dogs for a dollar off of a bottle of Advil. The dogs of Michael Vick. Suggest that they might have seen the wrong price tag and they will respond as if you had insulted all that is decent and just. It will not matter if you have the machine read the bar code once or twice or a thousand times, for they have no faith in machinery. They saw the price tag, and the price tag says it should be a dollar less.

They saw the price tag, and what it said was that they have to send away for their dollar. It's a mail-in rebate. If they trust the machinery enough they can do it online. Unlike the dogs of Michael Vick however, this defeated mongrel will walk away only slightly humiliated. If she were capable of humility that is. In her eyes the whole episode is the fault of my employer. Listening to this battle raging at the front register as I opened the pharmacy was how I started my day, and it made me glad for the time I put in college, for the time I put in college keeps me away from such things for the most part.

My joy was short lived however, as the first caller of the day asked if I was from the south. It was my accent she said, and now it was I  whose sense of decency and justice had been shat upon, as I would rather be in Michael Vick's doghouse than to ever have resided below the Mason-Dixon line. The tone was set. It was gonna be a "Highlights From Today's Pill Counting Action" kinda day.

The two Vicodin prescriptions in front of me marked the beginning of a journey for the dopey-ass kid who just dropped them off. Each paired with a different antibiotic, they were written on consecutive days from two different dentists. The dopey-ass kid had embarked down the road of drug-seeking dishonesty, and he would someday get better at it, assuming he applied himself. As he came to the register to receive his haul this day however, looked at me, and said, "there were two Vicodins," lesson number one on his journey to addiction sunk in. Namely, that pharmacies keep track of these type of things, and will call your doctor to have Vicodin prescriptions cancelled if you're too lazy to have them filled separately.

No concern was expressed for the lost antibiotic, and Mac Davis' "Baby Don't get Hooked On Me" played over the store's radio as the dopy-ass kid absorbed his first lesson in drug seeking, thereby confirming my knowledge that Mac Davis is an omnipotent being far closer to spiritual nirvana than most of us can ever hope to be.

A guy on his cellphone walked by and said into it, "yeah, I'm at the DMV." An outright lie which further lowered my faith in humanity. I spent most of the next hour wondering what circumstances could possibly make it necessary to lie about being at the DMV.

I think we broke the record for number of labels plastered on a metered-dose inhaler spacer. For the love of God all you PA's and nurse practitioners out there, please stop writing for spacers to go with the albuterol you give for acute bronchitis. They never get filled. Ever.

I stopped an azithromucin/flecanide interaction and 30 seconds later fielded a call as to the price of Welch's grape jelly. I made up a number. I think saving someone's heart from exploding entitles me to do that. I think Welch's grape jelly was 99 cents last Friday if I remember right. I hope I didn't just show my age by quoting a rediculously  low price for grape jelly.

I do know that my favorite scotch is now $32.99 a bottle, up from $29.99 last week. I wonder if that would prompt Mac Davis to sing to me.

I watched a guy try to pick up a chick wearing black fuck-me boots as a kid with a giant afro jogged by chanting, "I love my ball.....I love my ball.....I love my ball ball ball ball ball...." The chant faded into the background...."I love my ball ball ball ball ball....." as the guy crashed and burned. Fuck-me boots chick was just messing with him, like a cat messes with a mouse before dealing a death blow. As I watched I decided I could easily go another month without cable with this type of entertainment in front of me, and that fuck-me boots are the greatest invention ever.

The day ended with a couple having a knock-down, drag-out fight over who was going to sign the credit card slip. It wasn't a matter of which credit card would be used mind you, only over which of them would have the honor of signing the paper that would never be looked at again. Part of me thought being rejected by fuck-me boots chick, and thereby avoiding these types of intra-relationship power struggles, might have been best for that guy in the long run. Part of me couldn't get that chant out of my head, "I love my ball....I love my ball....I love my ball ball ball ball ball...." it really was quite rhythmic.

Most of me though, just wished the two people fighting in front of me like two of Michael Vick's dogs would just wrap it up already so I could go home. I ended the day feeling not quite as good about my college education as when the day began.


9 comments:

Unknown said...

I recognize that kid's ball chant as the Dora the Explorer song "Bouncy Ball".

Why is this crap in my memory? It's in the to-purge parts of having a preschooler.

Shy Intern. said...

EW I hate typos.

*Highlights, not Highlight's.

Raquel said...

Was THIS the ball chant ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WYBZ4eJAe0&feature=youtube_gdata

Anonymous said...

Aawwwww Drug Monkey, you should be proud of your college education. Remember, the people who are most important in your life (i.e. people wo truly love you) will love you no matter what, and the right person for you will be willing to compromise with you therefore avoiding any type of "power struggle." That right person will be the right person for you because you love them for exactly who THEY are. Retail is retail, just don't take it personally. Trust me, it will make your work life so much easier! :)

woolywoman said...

Hey, we nurses had to move heaven and earth to get the idiot PA's to write for a spacer, ever. So now they write for all of them. So what. Don't mess with the spacers. I love my spacer space space space spacer...nope, the ball chant is better.

ok said...

The fact that this kid was singing a Dora The Explorer song makes the post 10x better.

DrugMonkey, Master of Pharmacy said...

Raquel,

That's it. Thanks for putting it back in my head.

Anonymous said...

It's just a matter of time for Drug Monkey to be institutionalized.I can see him now running around the loony bin chanting "I love my ball!"

PharmD Candidate said...

The NJ Poison Information and Education System is in danger of being closed down.

Please sign this petition and ask fellow pharmacists and pharmacy students to do the same. This is a very important resource for all of us!

http://www.petitiononline.com/NJPIESRX/petition.html