Highlights From Last Friday's Pill Counting Action.

Any day that starts off with a giant pigeon is bound to be a "Highlights From Today's Pill Counting Action" kinda day. He flew across the store shortly after I opened the pharmacy gate. He stared at me as I waited on my first customer and caught up with the voice mail messages from the night before. I don't know why I assumed it was a he. Probably because I can't imagine a woman thinking something like "Hey! I wonder what would happen if I flew through that open door?" and then looking so stupidly happy about what they had done when there is obviously no long-term plan for survival. The pigeon flew through the door for the same reason Sir Edmund Hillary climbed Mt. Everest, because it was there, which makes perfect sense if you are a man.

I decided that doctors and nurses must think they will get paid more for giving me as little information about a prescription as possible. They guard the patient's date of birth at times like it is a bar of gold in the vaults of Fort Knox. They are surprised every time I ask if Kathy is spelled with a "C" or a "K", and are amazed that I want to make sure the prescription is for John Smith and not John Smith Junior or that I might want to know the strength of the amitryptiline he is to take. Sometimes I feel as if I am in a spin-off of the old TV game show "Name That Tune," and being able to fill a prescription with the fewest number of notes will qualify someone for a large cash prize.

While I was thinking about money, I decided that Benjamin Franklin looks like a girl, and that Alexander Hamilton's picture on the ten dollar bill totally makes it look like he's wearing makeup. I wondered if the artist who creates the money pictures is a transvestite. That would be awesome.

The computer stopped the filling of a prescription to warn me of a potential interaction between Antabuse and alcohol. For those of you playing along at home, Antabuse is given to alcoholics precisely because it makes a person sick if they take it with booze. The human/machine transfer of stupidity seems to be going well.

I got a report from the front of the store that the new clerk had scooped a fly into someones ice cream. The clerk saw the fly, said "eww!!," then scooped it into the customers cone right in front of them. The customer seemed upset. After the manager on duty told me this tale in a way that implied the new clerk might not be the sharpest knife in the drawer I asked if there was a plan to deal with the pigeon, and he looked at me like I had just said something in Swahili. He moved onto the next subject, which was a man who insisted the previous night's manager had given him the right to name his own price for cigarettes. He decided on $9.99 a carton. I wondered why not $4.99 or $1.99 and decided maybe he liked the look of Alexander Hamilton's eyeliner.

I explained to a customer that they have discontinued old-school mercury thermometers because they were worried about them breaking and exposing people to mercury. "Oh that's great!!" said a customer who overheard and felt the need to butt in. " I was exposed to a lot of mercury as a child!!" It explained an awful lot, that statement did. I wish you knew the customer who said that my friends, because that statement explains an awful lot about them.

The computer ground everything to a halt again to warn me  that doxycycline was contraindicated in pregnancy. We had filled a birth control prescription for this customer 15 days ago. I studied my ass off for 5 years in order to be able to handle these types of situations.

I looked up and a lady with a big net on a pole was walking back and forth from one side of the store to the other. About 10 seconds behind the pigeon who was flying back and forth from one side of the store to the other.

A customer asked me if we carried organic iron and I wondered if maybe he meant hydrocarbon based.

I got a "coverage expired" reject on a claim for some Viagra. The man had been covered on his wife's insurance and she had recently died. The man was very upset his newly dead wife's insurance would no longer pay for his Viagra. The pigeon finally flew out the front door, no doubt disgusted with this bizarro world he had stumbled upon.

I'm betting when they redo the one dollar bill they will make George Washington more effeminate. Thoughts like that are the only things that keep me sane some days.