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| 6:53 p.m.-2003-11-21 Here I am. Freaking nearly 7pm at work and I'm still here. I'm not supposed to even WORK on Fridays, and here I am. Today sucked oysters, and not in a good way. Started out just spiffy. See, I haven't been sleeping a lot lately. For the last 2-3 weeks, I've been averaging maybe 3-4 hours a night of sleep. 5 on the outside, if I'm lucky. If I'm /really/ lucky, I get a couple hours nap when I get home from work, but that hasn't happened lately either. So I don't usually work on Fridays, except that it was 'statement Friday', which translates to 'You come in and work, because we actually need you here for about 2 hours after we close to send out the bills for the month'. Mind you, I don't mind the extra pay, but....I like my 3 day weekends. I do. And they're rare enough, because someone is always snarking my day off anyhow. But I digress. The day started off as usual. I took the later bus into work because I figure they can handle the first 15 minutes of the day without me, since they are supposed to be working the whole day sans the Captain as it is. I walk through the door and all hell breaks loose. Some lady has come in with /36/ prescriptions between herself, her husband, and her sister whose in a nursing facility. Yeah. 36. And we don't have enough to go around for some of it, so we're calling our other store to buy from them so we can fill these orders. Meanwhile, she's bitching about the price of medication, having to take so many medications, how she should buy her medications from Canada, and so on. That's when ubermom walks in, and demands we fill her son's prescription. Now. So I take the kid's script and fill it with my usual efficiency. Which gets derailed, because we're down one pharmacist (the owner is out with hip surgery) already, and the youngest pharmacist (just graduated) has called in sick. So we're down 2 pharmacists. I got the script filled, but one pharmacist was busy filling 36 scripts at once, and the other was busy on the phone with this lady who didn't understand her medication. See, we're a compounding pharmacy, so we stuff medication into capsules for folks. Sometimes, it's because the medication isn't available commercially anymore, or there's no equivalent strength, or it's a mixture of two or more medications. This isn't uncommon. So this lady calls, and hijacks my only other pharmacist. You see, the first time she got her customized medication mix, it was white and larger than the second batch. She was concerned that we'd sent her the wrong medication. Looking back in our records, what had happened was the day she got her first batch, we happened to be /out/ of the usual blue-green capsules this medicine is normally made up in, and had to fall back on plain white in a slightly larger capsule as a one time thing. It was that, or make her wait a week till our supplier could get more of the usual color/size in stock again. We had sent her a message with the second batch, explaining this, but you see, she trusted us, so she threw away all the paperwork that came with her medicine, and didn't realize anything was 'wrong' (read, different) until she'd run out of the first batch. For the next fourty-five minutes, he explains in every conceivable manner, why this has occured. She can't understand why her medication has changed. You see, she's called all the other compounding pharmacies in town, and they've never even heard of colored capsules, or capsules of more than one size, or even filler in medications. After all, all medications are absolutely pure and don't have any fillers. We are obviously a substandard compounding pharmacy and just out to make a buck off a poor old lady who has done her research and knows when she's being had! Oh yeah...and she'd called and talked to all her friends, adn they'd never even heard of a compounding pharmacy, so she was certain we were trying to poison her. So she wanted her money back and to keep the pills, which she was going to forward to the FBI for investigation. Right. Okay. Whatever. Finally, 45 minutes after this, my first pharmacist is still trying to fill 36 scripts at once. My second pharmacist checks the prescription for the Good Son, and the mother storms away, screaming in Chinese about how long we took. She's back ten minutes later. She tried to give her son the medicine, and he couldn't swallow the pills. He's only nine, you see, and he can't swallow anything without chewing, he'll choke. She wants liquid. Why didn't we know she wanted liquid? She always gets his medicines in liquid. We'd never filled for this woman or her benighted offspring before. Oh, and she didn't like the copay her insurance company assigned to the medicine either. Meanwhile, my second pharmacist has been captured by another customer to do a consultation that begins to stretch into the dozens of minutes, and my first pharmacist manages to finally fill the 36 scripts, only to be handed a list of about a half dozen refills by the same woman. She forgot, you see, and we've made her time run out on her parking meter, and she really doesn't like that we have the nerve to charge her more than $3000...nevermind she refuses to take generic on anything. My first pharmacist manages to fill the screaming Chinese woman's liquid antibiotic for her son, when all hell breaks loose out front at the register. Waiting quietly in all the confusion were an elderly couple who have been customers for years. She's from the Phillipines and doesn't speak grand English, and he's blind and in his 70s. The fat cow has informed them that they're taking up too much room, taking up 2 of the 3 chairs in the pharmacy, and would they go sit in the lobby, where the wind blows right in every time someone opens the door into the medical office building. Yup. The fat cow threw out two 70+, cash paying, never complaining, utterly patient, GOOD customers of ours because they were trying to sit in a warm place, waiting for their taxicab to get here. And then she had the nerve to say that our owner would've approved. We had, at the moment, about 13 people waiting for prescriptions at that point in time, because we were hellishly backed up. Needless to say, I doubt we will ever see a single one of those people again, due to her actions. About then, the vet tech showed up. The first pharmacist had left for lunch, and she shows up, in a bloody awful hurry, to pick up an emergency order. We can't find it. We don't know anything about it. She goes into hysterics about this damn sick dog, and finally, the second pharmacist, who has been cast adrift with me in the seas of ignorance, finds a half-intelligible scrawl from the first pharmacist, about this medication. We assume this is the order she's screaming about, and get her out of the way, only to run face to face with another busload of customers. It was hell on earth for a solid hour until my first pharmacist and lead tech reappeared from lunch, which they left for without telling anyone about. Then it was time for lunch. Yes, this all happened before lunch. I turned around to get my lunch from the fridge in the breakroom, and the student technician we're training had hijacked the room. See, we have student technicians come from time to time to fulfill their 'work 3 months in a retail setting' requirement from the state. Well, this lady, really, she's sweet, but she's like a female version of Gollum. And she's devoutly Muslim...which I admire, I really do, but she never ever tells anyone when she's going to go pray. She just goes. She'll stop what she's doing, and just vanish. And hole up for an hour...in this case, she holed up with my precious sandwiches. I waited 45 minutes, and gave up when I only had 15 minutes of lunch left. I fled to the hospital cafeteria, where I had the 'Mighty Cobb Salad'. The only difference between regular Cobb salad and this monstrosity was guacamole, I think. So I scarfed the Mighty Cobb Salad, and ran back upstairs to get back to work. After that, the day calmed down...but here I am, still at work. It's taken me nearly half an hour to type this up...crap. And I LIKE my job? I need my head examined. Especially because I just realized that while I was typing this crap, I could've been working on the third party insurance billing that I haven't had a chance to touch all week. Crap. The boss's wife is gonna skin me alive on Monday, and I don't have time to do any of it now. I didn't have time all bloody damn week. I certainly don't have time ten minutes before the report finishes printing! Fuckityfuckfuck. Did I mention I'm running on 4 or less hours of sleep a night for the past 2 weeks? I'm screwed, might as well enjoy the weekend! The Captain
 The Internet's Mood: The Captain Recommends Dogcessorize 2006-08-13 - Movie Review: Monster House 2006-08-07 - Movie Review: The Descent 2006-06-09 - Movie Review: The Omen 2006-06-03 - She's here, She's here! 2006-05-22 - Blame the Cabin-Boy for playing 50 questions.
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