So yesterday, I got this idea. I should be an iPhone for Halloween! I went to staples and bought some foam board and Velcro ( ~$20), some aluminum foil and spray adhesive from work (~$6) , and printed all the icons and marking @ Kinkos (excuse, me FedEx Office). Total cost about $35. Not bad for how it came out:
Click the thumbnails for full size.
Can’t wait for Saturday.
Today was my day off, so I decided to head downtown to get my haircut. (Before you get all excited, it was a $20 haircut. I can’t afford no salon!)
Anyway, afterwards, I decided to head up to Times Square to hang out and read a book, since it’s a nice day. On the way, though, I managed to bite through the cold sore on my bottom lip. I stopped in to Walgreens (edit: It was Duane Reade) to get a recommendation.
The pharmacist recommended that I put Anbesol Cold Sore Ointment on it to relieve the pain and keep it moisturized. No neosporin since it’s on the lip and wouldn’t do much good anyway.
Ok, good advice. The technician checked me out, and I asked if she had a pair of scissors I could borrow to open the tube. (It’s the kind you have to cut off the tip, not just poke through foil.)
“No,” she said. I replied, “You don’t have scissors in a pharmacy?” She then told me thay were’nt allowed to let customers use them. It’s a stupid liability rule, but ok. I then asked if she would cut it open for me.
She refused again, saying it wouldn’t be sterile. “Well, anything I use to cut it wouldn’t be sterile, right?” I asked. “I mean, this isn’t a hospital clean room.”
Well, she obviously didn’t feel like dealing with me, because she handed me off to the pharmacist, who basically repeated everything she had said. I was getting annoyed at this point, so I said, “Look, I work in a pharmacy. I know you have alcohol. Rub the freaking scissors with it and cut open the tube before I open it with my teeth!”
He finally, reluctantly, agreed. I mean, come on, there’s a difference between protecting your patients and protecting your own rear end.
Edit: By the way, this post was written and posted in the Times Square Visitor’s Center. How cool is that.
I’ve had a website of some form or another online since I was 11 years old and obsessed with Egyptology. I’ve been thinking about my journey, where I’ve been and what I’ve been through in the past 14 years (so you can infer from that number that I’m about 25; this December in fact).
Searching your history through the wayback machine can be fun, provided you remember the web addresses. I’ve had websites about Star Trek’s version of the 29th Century, frames, tables et al included; it was even designed for 640×480. Those were the days, huh?
Actually most of my sites were related to Trek in one way or another. The first was for an IRC sim (aka RPG); the second was based on Voyager, the 3rd/4th on my own version of Star Trek (see 29th century above.)
My first blog was called “On the Edge of Forever,” after my favorite original Star Trek episode. (Can you tell I like Trek?) I wish I still had the graphics for that site, but, alas, they’ve been lost in time and archive.org not saving the stylesheet. I was in my freshman (and sadly, only) year of college. It’s amazing what I thought was so important back then, that seems so trivial now.
That blog went online in March of 2004, so that means I’m coming up on my 6th anniversary as a blogger in just 5 short months; not that I’ve been active most of that time. A quick perusal of the archives of this site will tell you that. I tend to post for a while, then go for months without posting. I’ve stopped trying to analyze the reasons why.
A couple of years later, I started this blog. I originally intended it as a kind of “Pharmacy News without Corporate Influence” blog. Podcasts were all the rage, and I even recorded a couple of 10 minute podcasts in which I spoke too fast. I don’t think anybody ever subscribed to them.
So, as is my wont, I let the blog go for a few months, then made another foray into the online world, posting funny and/or annoying stories about my day at work. If you’ve been a long time reader (do I even have any?) You’ve suffered my puns, felt my pain, laughed at (and with) me, and given me an outlet for all my successes and failures. For that, I thank you.
If you’re new to the site, take a moment and look around. I’d like to think some of my old stories still hold their weight. For now, I’ll just say I’m going to try to post more, though the many gaps in my archive are evidence of how well that usually goes.
Otherwise, you can find me on twitter. Yes that was the whole point of this post. It’s taken me a while, but I’ve finally caught the twitter bug.
Well, not the whole point. Or was there even a point at all? You decide. I’m too tired to.
(Sorry for the rambling post. I just felt like typing this out, so, well, there ya go.)
So it looks like I blogged too soon about not having any drama. Nothing major, but I keep telling myself I need to blog some more, so here goes:
Yesterday, a guy asked us to transfer his Viagra from another store (within our company). When I transferred the prescription, it came up with an interaction with his Imdur 60mg. For those of my followers who aren’t in pharmacy, Imdur is a NITRATE (you know, those drugs that have such a bad interaction with Viagra they warrant both an onscreen and verbal warning from the narrator in the commercial.)
So needless to say, the pharmacist didn’t want to fill it without verification from both doctors that it was ok. (Though, in her words, “What can the doctor say that will make me feel comfortable enough to fill it?”)
When the patient came back to pick up, the pharmacist went out front to talk to him and say she wasn’t comfortable filling the prescription, and he lit into her. I thought at one point I might have to call security, but he didn’t get violent, just mad. “Can’t you see I’ve been getting both drugs for two years!?”
He was kind of trying to steamroll her, so I went out to try to explain things in a different way. (“Do you really want your prescription filled by a pharmacist who isn’t comfortable filling it?”), but he just stormed away. We were both a little shaken by the situation, but felt good knowing we at least tried to keep somebody from dropping dead.
Then, today, another patient came in with a transfer from another company. He paid out of pocket the last time he came to our store (which was the first time, too), so we didn’t have his insurance on file. When I went to ring him out, I said, “That’ll be $10.99.” All of a sudden, he got very mad. “I have insurance! I don’t pay anything for my prescriptions!”
I went to the computer, and saw that he had paid out of pocket for the last medication he got. When I questioned him on it, he said, “That isn’t covered by my insurance, so I didn’t give you the card.”
My retort: “So, how can I bill your insurance if you never gave me your card?”
His response: “…”
I’m good, but I’m not that good.
So, for those of you who didn’t know (and there’s no reason you should), I was organizer of the DC Bloggers Meetup Group for the better part of this year, even though I didn’t really post on this blog (or any other blog for that matter) for most of that time.
Since moving to New York, I was disappointed to find that there wasn’t really a social blogging meetup like the one in DC. The NY Bloggers Meetup had apparently been inactive for quite a few months. So I emailed the current “Organizer” and asked if she would be ok with me taking over, and for now I’ve been made assistant organizer until the current organizer’s meetup.com subscription expires.
So if any of you out there are in the NYC area and write a blog, want to write a blog, read blogs, or just want to have a good time with bloggers, go and check it out. We’ll probably start having meetups after the first of the year. Right now, I’m going to be too busy volunteering with WordCampNYC, which is coming up in November, and by that point the Holiday’s will be here and nobody is going to want to start planning for a meetup.
Also, if there are any pharmacists, technicians or interns in the New York area, I’d love to get a pharmacy meetup going. Send me an email to andrew [at] chronolink [dot] net if you’re interested.
P.S.: If I’m going to be organizing the NY Bloggers group, I guess I’d better get my butt in gear and actually post some stories.
Ok, so yeah. I always promise I’m going to post more and I never do, so I’m not going to do it this time.
I mentioned in my last post that I was moving to New York. Well, I’ve been here for about 3 1/2 months now. What can I say? Everything costs twice as much, I’m broke all of the time, and I don’t know anybody…
And I still love it here.
NYC is one of the best places to people watch; one of my favorite past times. I still think it’s cool that I can head down to Times Square and just sit at a table, literally ON Broadway (they finally got rid of those cheap lawn chairs a while back), and just read a book and watch the tourists gawking at the tall buildings and advertisements.
I spend some of my time off in the subway busking; playing music (for me specifically, the Irish flute, and tin whistle) to make some spare cash. It’s a quick way to make a buck, and I usually don’t get moved on by a cop. (That only happened once, during rush hour, which I’ve since learned doesn’t pay well anyway.)
As far as pharmacy goes, there isn’t much to tell. For the first couple of months that my new store was open, I was spending half of my time floating at other stores. HR at my new store goofed and hired two technicians for a 1-tech store. Thankfully (for me anyway) the other tech didn’t work out, so I get to work full time at my store now. Of course, since I’m at a very slow store (we finally did 200 scripts in one week just last week), I’m running out of things to pass my time with.
About the only bit of drama I’ve had was at one of the other stores I was floating at; I opened that morning and was filling scripts in the workflow that I was used to. Later in the morning, two other techs (with much less experience than me) came in and completely disrupted the workflow and undid about 2 hours of work (It’s a busy store). One of them literally yelled at me for not doing things “their” way; So I just left. Not the best way to handle things for sure, but I left my store in Virginia to get away from that kind of drama, so I just figured I wasn’t going to put myself through it here.
Otherwise, it’s just been the usual; clueless doctors and nurses, patients that refuse to listen to you. (“This can’t be the same vitamin; It comes in a green bottle.” “Yes, ma’am; we have a different manufacturer here.”) Nothing much worth posting about. I guess I’ll try and post some on my non-pharmacy experiences here in New York. But, considering I’m broke most of the time, I don’t really do much except people watch and play music on the subway.
Anyway, I hope that gets anyone who’s interested up to date. Ciao.
