Slow times

Sorry for a lack of updates. CorpoPharm has been pleasantly slow, after a huge boom for the first quarter of the year.

This has made me reflect quite a bit on our day-to-day operation. I spend a good bit of time actually doing work -- receiving orders, doing miscellaneous pill counting, pulling outdates, data entry, ringing register, the likes -- but it seems a lot of time lately has been spent on two things:

1) Answering questions pertaining to the restroom
and
2) Answering questions pertaining to "extra" services

I can't even tell you what percentile of my day is spent playing GPS and pointing people to our bathroom. I've frequently questioned if people purposely drink a gallon of water/tea/soda/WHATEVER when they leave their houses, and say "Oh look, there's CorpoPharm. Potty break!". Now, I can understand the service workers who help us out, like our vendors that bring in orders, and our UPS men who spend all day in their trucks, and people such as that. But, I can't even begin to count how many regular people start out at the front door and make a beeline for our front registers, asking how to get to the bathroom. The directions are simple -- go all the way to the back, just after beauty. However, somehow they confuse "beauty" with "pharmacy counter". Yeah, you caught me. I'm hiding the toilet between Tekturna and Trileptal. I repeat the simple directions, and throw in a few hand motions to demonstrate down and right. We've remarked quite a few times that we'd like a tape player with a continuous loop, so we could just hit "play", let it roll all day, and go back to work. It's pathetic.

Part two -- "extra" services. No, not those kind of services. People frequently call up CorpoPharm and ask if we have delivery, if we can bring them a quart of milk with their delivery, and if we will keep their credit card on file so they could call us and have their photos and prescriptions and their laxatives and maybe some eyeshadow waiting, all paid for, as they run through the drive-thru. This is part of what is wrong with pharmacy. I've ranted on the drive-thru before -- I think it's great for disabled elderly people, people with SMALL children (read: NEWBORN to MAYBE 2, to be generous. If they can walk and hold your hand, GET OUT OF THE CAR!), and people who have just completed surgery and are still puking all over themselves from the anesthesia. So, when Joe Schmo pulls through, and says "Hey, can I get my photos here? Oh, and a pack of batteries for my camera, thanks!", I shut my window on them, after explaining that this is the PHARMACY department, and we don't do photos in the PHARMACY. You have to go to the photo counter. I don't hand my prescriptions to Susie up front, and ask her if she can just fill them and hand them to me right then. I wouldn't hand my film to my pharmacist, and tell them to step on it, that I have places to go. It's ridiculous, and people are truly trying to make us into less of professionals than we already feel like when people just dump a cartload of stuff at our counter, and say "The girl up front has one person in line, and I didn't feel like waiting for them to finish. I'm sure you don't mind ringing this all up! You're not busy." Don't even go there.

As for the delivery stuff. CorpoPharm offers delivery at SELECT locations. We are not one. We have not been one. If we had enough hours for a delivery driver, and we had an actual viable amount of people who needed delivery, I'm sure we could appeal to CorpoPharmacy to change this. However, most of our clients don't ask for delivery, so we are all too happy not to start a big fight to get a driver. Plus, it is not the delivery driver's job to get you your triple-a batteries, and maybe some pink lipstick (coral, not baby!) to boot. Their job is to bring your prescription to you, have you sign for it, and pay for it. The end. That's all it takes. That's all they're expected to do. If you have a serious reason you can't get something, and are nice to us, maybe, we can bring you a container of milk. But that lipstick isn't something you should expect the driver to want to grab you. You know we'd never get it right, anyway.

I don't know. It feels like we're almost becoming a joke back there. Between being the BDB (Bathroom Direction Booth) and fielding these ridiculous requests at the drive-thru and on the phone, it makes me shake my head much more often than I should at work. We are pharmacy PROFESSIONALS. We are not cashiers, so please do not bring us your entire cart. We're more than happy to help you with your medicine. Just stop asking these ridiculous things of us.