You learn to make your way through the small talk when you work behind the pharmacy counter. Tiny talk. Microscopic talk. Talk you will look up and down and over and under with a magnifying glass and still, despite the best of your efforts, find it utterly empty of any meaning. The weather. Christ on a cracker there IS no weather where I live and I still spend at least an hour a day listening to people drone on about it. Sports. Yeah. The quickest way to get me to tune you out is to start talking about the team of large men who don't realize they're gay and their efforts to hit, carry, kick, or throw a ball of some sort over an imaginary line.
For some reason though, I heard the lady say her favorite baseball team was the Brooklyn Dodgers, and I wanted to punch her.
The Brooklyn Dodgers, you see, don't exist. They haven't since 1957. This means they cannot be your favorite team. They might have been your favorite team. Maybe you like the fact that they broke the color barrier when they signed Jackie Robinson ten years earlier, which would be very admirable, but the fact is, if you can remember the day the Brooklyn Dodgers last took the field, you qualify for Social Security. Why the fuck don't you tell me now how your favorite pet is a passenger pigeon, or better yet, buy yourself a goddamn clue with the dollar and twenty five cents you just saved using coupons form the paper and enter the world of reality? The Dodgers are in fucking Los Angeles and have been since long before your pharmacist whose hair is turning grey was even born. Exactly how long will this take to sink in? The fact you still don't know what to do to operate the credit card reader you've been using at least once a week for five years doesn't give me a lot of hope.
The fact I get so bent out of shape about this makes me even madder at myself. Sports are stupid, and I shouldn't even care. The fact I do pisses me off. This is usually where I go have a drink to break the hate cycle but it's not even noon. Goddamn it.
Stupid bitch.
12 comments:
I think you just became my new best friend.
Uh, sports are fun. That's really all there is to it.
sounds like time to go walk among the redwoods with only hoot owls to scare at night
It's noon somewhere.....release the Laphroaig, kind sir.
You poor man. I don't see you stand it.
Should have been, how you stand it.
I thought that the Dodgers was a footall team.
sports are just like any other hobby, something to get into, but if someone isn't into the same sport, talking about it is pretty pointless. But most patients are clueless anyway
yup. "Happy Mothers,Fathers Day" - I am neither to you (thank god)."Hot out, cold today, raining again,.....yup yup yup". We have an oversized pen on the counter because our corporation can't afford to supply us with pens, and everyone steals them. So I hear "BIG PEN!!!,nobody will take that one,Can you find a BIGGER PEN?,guffawguffaw" til I want to stab someone in the eye with it.
Hardly ever a meaningful comment, and you see these same people at least 50 times a year. How about "Gee - do you ever worry about getting your head blown off by a junkie?" or even "What's it like to take endless crap from morons for an unlivable wage?" (I'm not a Pharmacist) They know better than to talk sports - my eyes glaze over immediately. But being white, they all assume I agree with every stupid scathing comment that the have about Obama.
TechTard...it's the same absolutely everywhere. It's scarier though when you find yourself in conversations like these outside the pharmacy.
Sometimes, I wish I could take my dog (she's very sweet and very intelligent, incredibly cute and it's in the features of her breed that she appears to be smiling all the time--very, very cute, and a loyal little pooch) to work and have her nap in comfort behind the counter, so that she could hear some of the inanity that goes on. On private signal from me, she could let out a growl, and when opera came on the radio she's sing the soprano part. She's the kind of girl that bares her teeth and barks savagely when those that don't have friendly intentions even look at me. Her eyes' speak for her, so we could get by on wordless conversations, and there's no fooling her. She can tell the honest fools from the other. I suppose customers might complain about her very fine, long hair in their prescription bottles, but MY day might go better, I think.
Awww,I know it's the same everywhere. Wish I was your dog! I don't have those conversations outside of work. People label me rude for not saying "god bless" at a sneeze, GOOD MORNING! all cheery like, or "Happy Birthday!" to people way to old to be concerned about such a thing. And I don't notice if other people do or don't say such things. Don't care. But back to DrugMonkeys point (I hope)- people spend muchmuch time talking bull... and little time on the interesting or worthy.Perhaps my own rant is uninteresting too. But I am fascinated by truly seeing the person with whom I am dealing with. The woman that broke down sobbing and tells me her husband just had a massive stroke, the middle-aged customer that just wrote and had enacted her first play at the local theater,even the junkie that I can help get info on Suboxone's free treatment provider's. They make it worthwhile.
The Dodgers did not break the color barrier; the Royals of Montréal did. Just saying...
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