This week has sucked. We got spoiled at work with a pretty slow day on Tuesday, only to get a deluge of people on Wednesday who just had to have their things done right now. The only things that could have been better on Tuesday were the fact that we had to deal with one woman who was coming to get her daughter’s birth control a week early and insurance wouldn’t cover it yet (we were unaware that her MD had told her to skip the sugar pills, something we’d also dealt with on Friday, and Monday) and she’s bitching at us about how now her daughter’s going to get cramps. We also discovered that we were billing out some guy’s insurance for 30 tabs of Combivir since January but actually dispensing him 60 tabs, which should have been correct, so we’ve effectively fucked up our inventory and gotten paid for half of what we actually gave out. Lovely!

One Tuesday our local crackhead came in, handed Supertech 4 scripts, told her she didn’t have enough money for all of them and pointed out which one she’d like to just get a couple of until she got paid this week. This is typical of the crackhead, but it turned out that the one she specificaly asked to not get charged for was the cheaper of her two copays, and she wasn’t expecting to pay $3 for one of the others. As usual she stands at the register whining about how she needs this stuff, doesn’t have the extra $2, she just got released from the hospital, etc, and another of our regulars tells her she’ll cover the $2. Crackhead thanks her and promises to come back on Wednesday to bring the $2 back for us to give her and we’re all sitting behind the counter thinking “She’s never going to see that $2 again. However, once in a great while the universe throws us a curve ball, and crackhead showed up yesterday with the $2. As luck would have it, she showed up about 5 minutes before the woman who loaded it to her showed up, so they got to do the dance of “Take it - no, keep it - no, take it” for a while.

And when I say that that was the highlight of my day yesterday, I mean it. I felt very bad about leaving the RPh there without a tech for the last 3 hours considering that the order hadn’t been touched and I know she was frazzled as hell, but I just couldn’t stand being there anymore.

We arrived at work this week to be told that we had to take an employee survey about what we think about our workplace and the company as a whole. The survey was your typical bullshit about whether or not we strongly agree or disagree with a series of statements such as “My manager gives me the tools I need to succeed” and “I feel that there is room for me to advance within the company.” Because in a store that doesn’t have any sort of “lead tech” position (aside from the title of Supertech, but I’m sure she’ll tell you it doesn’t come with a pay raise) there’s oh so many promotions that I can get.

What makes this survey such completely and utterly insane is the fact that they’re hyping it as anonymous and voluntary. It’s so voluntary that there is a list of people’s names in the manager’s office that shows who has taken it so far, because the district manager is sending out messages along the lines of “Take the survey, it only takes 5 minutes” (or “minuets” as the note we got read) and it’s gone from a voluntary survey into that gray area between “mandatory survey” and “DO THE DAMNED SURVEY OR I’LL EAT YOUR SOUL.”

Plus, the automated survey system (or THE GIRL, as the old ladies refer to the automated system) must tell you about 15 different times how anonymous your responses are. “No information will be linked to you,” she says in that soothing voice. The recording then proceeds to ask you what your store number is, your job title, how long you have worked for the company, and whether or not you are a full time employee. Let’s see: a full time pharmacy tech who has worked for the company for between 2 and 3 years narrows the choices of employees to… just me.

Let’s hear it for anonymity!

Today was one of those days at work that wasn’t entirely bad. The phone system was fucked, which is bad for the customers who are too dumb to figure out that the girls at the front registers are perfectly capable of getting the pharmacy to answer it (eventually, anyway). However, that made things slow enough where we could stand around and bullshit. And in case any of my bosses ever reads this, by “bullshit” I really mean “giving each patient the individualized care that they require.”

Topics of today’s discussions were as follows:

• regarding Bette Midler’s song “From A Distance”: If God is watching us, does that make him a stalker? Is he watching us while we shower?
• if Santa sees us when we’re sleeping and knows when we’re awake, is he a stalker as well? And since he watches kids, does that make him a pedophile?
• things that would be on Supertech’s “wheel of reasons why I can’t date you”
• things that would be on our “wheel of early refill excuses”

It’s never a dull moment in there, really. Just before I left there was this really nasty couple buying syringes. Let me offer up some advice to any IV drug users out there. Please do not hurry your ass to the pharmacy counter for your syringes and then in the next breath ask if you can use the bathroom. Please do your shit in the parking lot of the bar behind us like all the other druggies, ok?

We had a monsoon here this afternoon, and just the threat of a little bit of rain kept all the crazies and old people in their houses, giving us a reasonably slow day. The most excitement we had was a crazy woman who bolted up the the drop off window and frantically shouted at me, in all caps, “CAN YOU HOLD IT FOR ME UNTIL TOMORROW WHEN I HAVE MONEY?!?!”

I’d never seen the crazy woman before, so I looked at her and simply said, “Ma’am, I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”

I’m in the process of testing out SocialThing. So far, I’m not too impressed. It’s incredibly slow. Things take forever to show up in the “friendstream”; Eddie used SocialThing to post to a couple of different services and while his updates went out as expected, they showed up at different times, with about an hour delay between them at most. And although I’ve entered the correct password 15 times now, it still won’t authenticate my Twitter account.

Update: It seems to authenticate now. There’s still a delay, but not as bad. I’m sure that if I was active on more social networks or had more friends on the ones that I do use SocialThing might be a bit handier for me, but so far I’m sort of “meh” about it. If you use Twitter, Facebook, Plurk, Flickr, etc, add me and make me feel special and whatnot.

Friday was a busy day at work, as can be the case on the day before a holiday weekend when all the old people are getting ready to lock themselves up in their houses out of fear of the young kids and their fun, and the junkies and drug seekers are coming in to get their party supplies in the form of tablets and capsules and syringes. We kept on top of things, but not without a bit of running around to do so.

We dealt with the girl who doesn’t believe she’s pregnant. She was in the hospital on Thursday night for some reason and before she passed out they were going to do a pregnancy test. She fell asleep before they were able to give her the results, and told her on Friday morning that she’s pregnant. She doesn’t believe them because she never saw the positive test, and spent 15 minutes hovering around the tests trying to find the exact brand that the hospital used and arguing with the RPh about how she can’t be pregnant because she’s bleeding (light spotting, from the description). This is also the girl whose mother came into the store in March or so asking if post-abortion fisticuffs were “ok for the blood flow down there“.

I managed to take the most disturbing call, from a youngish guy who had dropped off 4 scripts on Thursday and picked them up after I’d left for the night. One of his scripts, for Trazodone, having already been filled 2 weeks ago, was too soon to be filled and just put into the computer for future use. He called up on Friday morning to ask why he hadn’t received all of his meds, and so I explained that it was too early, on hold, etc, etc.

“Well, you see I got that prescription while I was in the hospital. And the reason I was in the hospital was because I’d, uh, I’d taken a whole lot of those Trazodone, so I don’t have any more of them.”

That’s the first time I’ve ever had a suicide attempt as a reason to get an early refill.

And let’s not forget the completely stupid doctor who sent a script for Prozac with the directions “as needed”. /facepalm Yes, let’s prescribe a drug that needs to be taken daily for several weeks before any results are seen and give it to a woman to take as needed. It doesn’t work that way, jackass.