Saturday, May 08, 2010

Highlights From Friday's Pill Counting Action.

I had the brainstorm of brainstorms when I saw the Coors Light truck. The Coors Light truck always fills me with a sense of desperation, appearing as it does  in front of the store on Friday mornings. Fridays are my twelve hour days you see, and seeing that truck at the beginning of a twelve hour shift each and every week has become a bit Pavlovian.

This day, however, the Coors Light truck triggered my brainstorm. I decided I would learn Arabic. Surely people that speak Arabic have no trouble getting decent paying jobs at the CIA, especially people who can prove without much effort they've never been to a Taliban training camp. My God, I could escape my job once and for all while at the same time learning lots and lots of secrets. I love secrets. I'd get a regular lunch break too and maybe even find Osama Bin Laden.

I walked in the door and the clerk manning the front register asked me what it means when your poop is blue-green and I crashed back into reality. I asked the first person to come to the counter whether we had filled prescriptions for him before or if this would be the first time.

"Both" he said. I didn't ask. I just got their information. I have learned that anything other than an unqualified "yes" means "get all my information."

The first fax of the day was from my employer's technical support department. The store manager had e-mailed them the night before that our phones were not working, and the fax said they were trying to call about his email but couldn't get through because the phones didn't seem to be working. By the way, if it seems like I've written about phone problems at my store before, it's because I have. My employer's decision to fix the phones with used parts salvaged from other phone systems is really paying off in terms of time saved and increased business opportunities.

We settled into our regular prescription filling routine, which was made far more pleasant by the fact there were no phones. I started telling my keystone tech for some reason about the days before real-time insurance claims. "We had this thing like a giant 8-track player, and you would put this huge-ass tape into it, then the computer would put all your medicaid claims for the week on it. Took about half an hour. Then you sent it into the corporate office and like a month later you'd get this printout with all the rejects you were supposed to fix."

I looked up and the hottest chick in the world was staring right at me. Nothing like showing the ladies how much of an old fart you are. I am one smooth operator. Although later on I'm pretty sure a customer told me she loved me. She said it as she was leaving, kinda like you would to your husband, without thinking about it. I decided I'll take my affection where I can get it these days.

A person asked where the bathroom was, as they needed to wash their hands because some hand sanitizer had spilled on them.

My other tech for the day was a rent-a-tech from another location in my employer's chain and he was...how do I put this?...terrible. I overheard him trying to deal with a customer upset with the price the discount card from his doctor got him on his Intuniv prescription. "THIS IS A CROCK OF SHIT!!" I heard the customer say, and my heart leapt for joy. It's not often these opportunities present themselves.  I walked over and relieved the rent-a-tech of his cashier duties.

"It will be just as much a crock of shit no matter where you go sir. Now, do you want to watch your language or do you want to go somewhere else?" Because anyone who knows me knows that I'm all about keeping the language clean...:)

The phone rang a few minutes later and startled us all. "Do you carry eyelash glue?" The man asked, and I chose to frame the experience in a positive light. Not that someone couldn't listen to the store's voicemail system and therefore ended up talking to the pharmacy when they shouldn't have, but that I had the chance to learn that people evidently put glue on their eyelashes for some reason. I bet that piece of knowledge will come in handy sometime when I least expect it.

The next call was pharmacy related. "My dad takes warfarin and this Pepto bottle says to ask your doctor before mixing it with warfarin. So I  should just give him half as much, right?"  I have no idea how the half-dose idea got into that woman's head and even though I talked her out of it, I still feared for her father's life.

Around the time we discovered the rent-a-tech sold the wrong prescription to a customer, a large group of men came in and started making noises that sounded something like "ahut a alubba eght ahloo" over and over again. One of them started waving around an Accucheck meter and making noises that sounded a little different, almost familiar. He expected me to respond to the noise.

I did,  by saying, "I'm sorry, I don't understand" This made the entire group repeat the noise louder. This went on for a good two or three minutes before I saw a customer walking away from the counter with his prescription for Keflex. Rent-a-tech had decided to ignore the tag that said "PENICILLIN ALLERGY" I had placed inside the bag and I had to almost tackle the customer as they walked away. My reward when I returned was a now angry group of noisemakers.

"Is this.....universal? I could buy in Iraq?" One of them finally said. I simultaneously wondered why in the hell this guy wasn't doing the talking in the first place and realized what language they were speaking.

Arabic. I still haven't decided whether this was a sign from Karma that I should go for my dream or a dire warning that she was not to be fucked with.

I washed away the day with a twelve pack of Coors Light. It seemed appropriate.

5 comments:

The HipCrip said...

Brilliant! Easily the funniest "Pill Counting Action" recap yet. If this is a by-product of that 12 pack of Coors, allow me to buy the next round.

Amelia Ramstead said...

I once told a customer "I love you" as I was hanging up the phone: "Okay, love you, bye." Hang up, stare at the counter for a moment. Sigh. I was her absolute favorite tech from that moment on.

Anonymous said...

easy there DM you might want to ease back on the throtle. I used to have a store manager that would buy 2 six packs every day and polish off one of them in the parking lot before going to his happy home. I saw him about 10 years later and he looked like he really needed a drink and a dialysis treatment

Từ Thanh Giác said...

I want to learn Arabic so I can move to a country, where I can beat my wife.

Anonymous said...

As someone who sees far more of the pharmacy than I'd like to, allow me to thank you for putting up with days like that so that we can get the meds we need. Really. Thank you.