Oy vey, what a week so far. It’s only Tuesday, and we’ve already done 2/3 of the prescriptions we normally do in a week. (Ok, for those of you that work in a busy CVS or something, don’t laugh at what I’m about to say.) Yesterday, we did 113 prescriptions, and today, we did 122. Ok, so that’s nothing compared to a busy pharmacy that easily does 2,000 a day, but when you’re used to no more than 70, it’s a pain in the patootie.
Just to let you know, if you’re a patient, don’t balk at a 1-hour wait time when there are 5 people in front of you, you have 5 prescriptions, and the pharmacist just went on lunch. (you’re lucky I didn’t tell you 2 hours.)
Then there was–we’ll call him Mr. Madperson. Over the weekend, his wife had brought in a prescription for him for Capoten, and we only had some of them in stock. The technician that was working informed her of that, and offered to call another pharmacy to see if they had the full quantity. She seemed fine with it, so they filled the script and went about their business. Later that night, they got a call from a very irate Mr. Madperson.
“Where do you get off giving me only 20 tablets when my doctor told me I was getting 60! I want to speak to a manager. I’m the customer, and I expect to have all of my medicine!” The pharmacist explained that they had told his wife we would have the rest in on Monday. But he was just too self-important to understand. He made the pharmacist promise it would be mailed out as soon as we received it.
So, when our supplier sent us a different manufacturer of the same medicine, I called him to let him know that the pills would look different. Of course, he berated me for bothering him, which startled me a bit, so I started to stammer. He then said, “You have six seconds to stop wasting my time! Now tell me why you’re calling!” So I stammered out, “Well, I…uh…just wanted to let you know that your pills are going to look different.”
“I don’t care if they’re purple, white, or polka-dotted or if I even take them at all! I’m sick and tired of you people and your incompetence!”
Well, by this time I’d had enough of his bulls**t, so I just blurted out, “Fine, sir, I’ll have it mailed out ASAP. Goodbye!” and hung up the phone before he could respond. That made me feel proud and ashamed at the same time; proud, for giving him a taste of his own medicine, but ashamed because it’s the first time I have ever hung up on a patient.
Thanks, Mr. Madperson for being so indignant about a partial-fill that you made me compromise my ethics. Consider yourself blog-flamed.