Highlights From A Half-Day Of Pill Counting Action.

OK, so, I have a question for you. Let's say you're out there in the world, just kinda living your life, going about your day to day business, everything going just fine, and all the sudden you get a call from a robot who says you have a prescription  ready. What would you do? Would you 1) Ignore the call because you know you're doing OK with your meds, or 2) At most, go to the medicine cabinet and check your bottles to see what you could be running low on so you could decide whether you wanted to buy another refill? Because if you would do either one of those two things, I have another question for you:

Do you really exist? Seriously. Are there people out there who would make the slightest effort to find out what the machine has told them to buy? Because I'm not seeing it. What I do see is a constant parade of people coming to the counter because they have been ordered to. They have no idea what they could be about to purchase. Not a clue as to how many prescriptions could even possibly be waiting for them. I'm not kidding you, when they get that call from the robot it's like getting some sort of surprise package for them. My already low opinion of humanity managed to sink a few more feet when I saw the other day how many more prescriptions we've been selling since the corporate mothership started their auto-fill program. The only good thing is the bonus money I'll be getting from all that extra revenue coming in.

BWWWWAAAAAHHHHAAAHHHAAHHHAAAAAA!!!!!! There's no bonus.

That does remind me of our district manager though, who I've mentioned before kinda sounds like a pirate when she talks. I know it's hard for a woman to sound like a pirate, but trust me on this, she pulls it off. An imitation of my District Manager is usually sure-fire comedy gold but my attempt this day fell flat on its face as I entered the happy pill room. I thought maybe it had something to do with the lady I saw brushing her teeth in our parking lot on the way in. How someone spitting their used toothpaste into the public sphere might put people in a bad mood. I was wrong.

The District Manager had been in earlier in the day evidently. With her boss. And her bosses boss. This was the equivalent of a visit from the Pope, or at least a high ranking Cardinal or two, thankfully without the pedophilia. Reports indicate the first thing they did was inspect the trash. There are now at our company, let me pause and make sure I'm getting them all... five different categories of trash. Each of which has it's own container. For example, a used alcohol swab, which, thanks to the characteristics of alcohol, is within a minute or two is a dry piece of cotton, is "hazardous waste," while a cotton ball used to stop someone's bleeding after an injection, which I will point out has and always will contain human blood, is just regular trash, and can be thrown out with my empty coffee cup and read newspaper. Call me a rebel, but I've always put the blood stained things in the sharps container. Fortunately no one noticed this during the trash inspection conducted by the man with a Masters in Business Administration.

The MBA man did leave word that I was unacceptably behind in my computer training modules though. So once I settled into work I stopped filling prescriptions and taking phone calls and learned that if there was a fire in the store, I should make my way to the nearest exit, and not walk up to the fire and try to make sweet love to it as I had previously thought.

Here's another question for you. Do you know if you're right handed or left handed? Because the first flu shot of the day didn't seem to. I always ask, you see, because my goal is to put it in the arm you use the least, as that arm is gonna be sore for a couple days. After a good minute of the man explaining that he did some things with his right arm but considered himself left handed, but he had an identical twin and he thought his twin was right handed, but threw a baseball with his left hand, I took a page out of the robot's playbook and just ordered him to roll up his left sleeve. While this was going on a man was insisting to my Supertech that his zero co-pay be put on his medical benefits card.

"I'm going to the bathroom" she said when the transaction was over.

"It's really gross back there." I reminded her.

"I know, but at least I'll get some peace and quiet for a few minutes."

About 10 minutes after I explained to a man that I could only print out an expense report for the year that covered his prescription drugs, and not what he paid for his extended hospital stay in another state, two fatty carts got in a wreck. Seriously. One of them just broadsided another right at an aisle intersection and neither of the fatties wanted to get up and help untangle the damage. I bet there would had been some road rage if either of the fatties had been able to muster up the effort.

The man who didn't know if he was right handed also missed his own age by 10 years when he filled out the flu shot questionnaire.

It could have been worse though. My Daddy could have toiled nights in the plastics factory, picking up overtime whenever he could in order to give me a chance to make something of myself, and I could have toiled away in one of the nation's finest universities, forgoing parties and football tailgating, in order to put into my head the knowledge both theoretical and practical that would allow me to make it in the world of commerce, and then... I could have been given the trash project, and spent my days making sure the HIPAA paper was always kept separate from the HIPAA plastic. Which is nothing like what a janitor does.

I also could have been ordered by a robot to buy the cheap scotch. Which makes me glad I didn't give them my real phone number. Cheers.