Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Highlights From Friday's Pill Counting Action.

If I had just hit that trash can. I couldn't help but to think as I pulled down the gate to end the day where I would have been if I had just hit that trash can 24 years ago.

Back then I was a smart kid. The great hope of the hillbilly county where I grew up you might say. Not long after I took the PSAT's I started getting mail from colleges and universities across the land trying to convince me to grace them with my presence. I remember the first one was from West Point. That would have worked out well. I soon ended up with grocery bags full of it, and sometimes I would look at the collection and think about how every piece of mail it contained represented a different direction my life could take.

I had decided not to bother with private schools though. I didn't want to do that to my parents, who were old-fashioned enough to believe they were responsible for educating their children. Private schools were too expensive, so their mail went straight into the trash. Mostly. The brochure from Ohio Northern University got hurled in the trash can's direction but landed right on the on the corner of the top, where it stayed for weeks, until I thought to myself  "What the hell" and sent in the card for more info. Ohio Northern subsequently gave me a scholarship, locking in the course my life was to take. The course where a person had just asked me what the difference was between the regular mixed nuts and the mixed nuts with "extra special" on the label.

If I had gone to West Point I'm sure that never would have happened.

When I arrived at the store the first thing I did was go to the storeroom. The phone system crashes every night now, and there is a procedure for getting it started again in the morning.  You can't just reboot the system, you have to flip the switches in a certain order, holding a certain button down for a certain number of seconds at exactly the right moment. It's all very McGuyverish, and we figured out the procedure all by ourselves, with no help from my employer's computer help desk. I found this morning that it seemed to speed things up if I hopped up and down on my right foot with my finger in the air. After the system came back to life I speculated about possible roles for tinfoil in this whole procedure as I walked to the pharmacy to start the day.

I opened the gate and called for the assistant manager to log in the cash drawer. My employer trusts me to be in a room full of drugs alone most evenings and all day Sunday but not to log in a drawer containing $75. Probably because I didn't go to Notre Dame like that one letter wanted me to. The manager arrived after 10 minutes elapsed and three people had formed a line. After my trusty tech rang up the first customer we found they had given us a drawer with two one dollar bills. We would spend the next half hour calling for change.

There has been a massive recall of liquid meds made by McNeil Consumer Healthcare. Tylenol, Motrin, Zyrtec, Benadryl. I've learned to love the irony of people who still don't want to lower themselves to buying the house brand even after they find out the name brand product has been pulled from the market due to quality control issues. I've spent a good chunk of my time of late explaining to numbnuts that the house brand is the same thing. Same ingredient, same strength...yadda yadda.....

"Well if I gave my son one teaspoon of the Tylenol, how much of this would I give him?" Something told me I wasn't communicating effectively. I wondered how else I could  phrase "the same"

A nurse attempted to phone in a prescription without ever mentioning the patient's name. When I asked her for it she said "I'LL JUST GIVE HER SAMPLES!!!!!!"  Another man waited a good two or three minutes to talk to the pharmacist so he could ask if there was a product that would help if his ball point pen broke during laundry and got ink all over his dryer. I recommended warfarin 2.5mg twice a day.

A customer walked by and asked if I was done for the day. It was 4:17 P.M.

When I really was almost done for the day an old man came to the counter with an old-school answering machine in a plastic bag. It used a cassette tape, which my love of all things retro thinks is awesome. I would have offered to buy it from him if he wouldn't have started screaming about how the machine broke while fielding a call from my employer's automated call system and that he was going to take us to court. Silly man. he should know that the cure to any phone related problems caused by our sickly phone system involves duct tape and the blood of a chicken slaughtered at sunset.

I spent that night dreaming of giant trash cans, and of being unable to get anything inside them.

9 comments:

jin said...

I don't know how you do it!
Sounds to me like you need a change of scenery m'dear. Write a book. You're brilliant with the stories [thruths] & I'm sure you've got more than enough to fill a library... er... I mean a book.
;-)

Từ Thanh Giác said...

I find it amazing that I also received mail from many universities whose contact to me was based on my SAT scores. Despite my high IQ I decided to go to Pharmacy School. What causes these dumb attacks? Perhaps being raised in the slums of New York City gave me a warped view of what is a noble profession. I was too skinny to think about going to West Point, but my classmate John did graduate from that military school. He rose to the rank of Colonel, but he is dead now and I am still among the living. If I hadn't gone to graduate school years later and changed professions I would among the living dead, envying the dead Colonel, as I enter the drug store to start my shift.

Anonymous said...

You poor dear. No, wait. I'm a poor dear. I remember that bunk all too well. All of us that recall it are poor dears. Maybe you're too young to remember the big thing to add to application letters back in the 70's was to mention how we'd exhibited leadership skills. I decided that 'I was a leader of followers' and got into pharmacy school at first go. The discussion at the beginning of the Army Battery took so long about privacy and confidentiality, that I promptly forgot to fill in my name and other identifiers and so never heard back from them. I guess a person has to not be confused or worry about privacy and other details when involved with acceptance into the Army.

And, then there's my kids who never filled out their National Merit Semifinalist Scholarship applications and ended up at local college, and are doing the same (I am pretty sure) as if they had ended up at brand-name schools.

Mike said...

I honestly laughed out loud at the warfarin bit. :D

Mom said...

My husband recently learned that by mixing hand sanitizer and water, you can get massive amounts of ink out of a white shirt right before a meeting with the boss. Turns out pocket protectors would not be so stupid after all.

Anonymous said...

well aren't you boys lucky West Point huh? Yes the the army wanted me real bad except I was wanted in Vietnam, seems us brown folks made good killers. Our local draft board was real upset when I went to Pharmacy school, they also couldn't understand why I couldn't graduate in 4 years like everybody else. I had to get a letter from the assistant dean of the Pharmacy school saying I was in a 5 year program

Tyler said...

hahaha, oh man, I could totally see some nutjob pulling that answering machine crap. I love all the random damn questions about stuff. Like "what's the best flavor of ensure?"
I always just tell them something, cause they came to me for an answer.

Anonymous said...

I had a MA start giving me a rx leaving out some info. I asked her for that info and she told me I was very unpleasant and she would leave a voicemail instead. She left info off the voicemail. Guess who got to give the info to a very unpleasant pharmacist despite her best efforts.

woolywoman said...

wait, why are you rebooting the phones? first thing? Can't it wait for a while?