MY LIFE - JUNE

Saturday, June 29, 2002

You know it's going to be a long day at work when you get there, used to things being calm, quiet, and relatively smooth, and instead find a complete disaster, a fill-in pharmacist who can't seem to grasp how things run in our store, and a whole shitload of people who decide to show up on this Saturday morning.

Just so that you might have any kind of understanding how things run in the pharmacy, one person types the prescriptions and sends them through to the insurance company. After it goes through insurance (or rejects), it goes into a queue where it can then be pulled by whoever might be filling prescriptions that day. Normally, these are pulled one person at a time so that we don't get all confused, which granted, doesn't always take much.

Imagine my surprise when I walk back there and find the counter by the filling station completely covered in printed labels. Our fill-in decided to print them all at once, then as a kicker, sent all the automation requests through as well (any script where the drug is in one of our automated cells and/or cassettes has to be pulled from queue twice), making things a pretty big disaster.

Meanwhile, there are six customers huddled around the front counter, our fill-in is running all over the place, our intern Susan is trying to help the people at the counter, and I'm trying to figure out what the hell happened. This was not a typical Saturday morning.

We stayed pretty crazy well past 10pm when Jean and Heather showed up. Jean came back and helped me out and Heather started working on the register to get some of the people out of there. The whole time, drive thru is going crazy with one person after another dropping one script off after another. Meanwhile, our fill-in is acting like things are completely out of hand, telling people it'll be at least a couple hours on refills. Yeah, it was busy, but there was no need to say two hours. I kind of wondered about that one.

We finally started to catch up around 11:30, 12pm, just in time to start the lunches up. Susan ordered her dinner and Linda (from up front) offered to go to McDonalds for anyone who was interested. I got to my break around 1:10pm, ate my lunch, and came back. By this point, Justin had arrived and things were finally under control. Then Steve got there at 2pm, the fill-in left, and all order was restored to our pharmacy.

I still can't understand some things. For instance, I told this woman four times not to worry about printing anything in queue, that we were more than capable of keeping her occupied with checking what WE were doing. She kept printing labels though despite us all telling her not to do it. She also has this habit of running around, trying to do everything back there. This wasn't going to work and it was getting obvious, yet she continued to do so.

I've dealt with this before, but Susan hadn't and was getting increasingly frustrated with our fill-in as the day went on. Not only did Susan not say much after a while, but she was also very cold when she did talk to our fill-in. Of course, our fill-in was 20 minutes late this morning (thus the back-up), so that might have had something to do with it.

All in all, it was a pretty hectic day. In between all this, Heather's trying to tell me all these stories about what was going on with her and I was trying to listen, but shit, it wasn't easy when I was getting spun around with people asking me things. If Heather herself wasn't asking me a question about something, Susan or the fill-in were and it was non-stop like that. I got absolutely nothing done for extended periods of time because of this, but I guess it's okay since that means that the people I work with trust me with their questions (yeah, I'm wondering why too).

Oh, and Heather. She's really pretty, but she's a bit flaky. You can just tell that this girl has pretty much had it made in her life. Anything she needs, she gets and she's got the whole popular girl look down pretty good. Now some of the things that she talks about, well, to say that it was boring would be gentle. She gets excited over really small shit and while that's fine, it doesn't make for good storytelling, especially when the words are coming out faster than anyone can possible process.

I thought Shelby talked fast, this girl has her beat by a long-shot. She can seriously talk and sometimes it takes a couple tries to figure out what she just said.

So she was telling me all these things that were going on and I'll admit, I'm starting to find that maybe there's a little more substance to her than originally thought, but there are still times when you just want to kick her. She does her job though and she's constantly smiling, so it's okay.

There is someone who we work with from the front store that flirts with her all the time. She finally got rid of him by casually mentioning to him that she was going to be with her boyfriend tomorrow night when he asked if she'd want to get together. I found this to be amusing not only because I'm not that fond of the kid this happened to, but because, well, okay, that's the only reason.

She does seem to be working out, as is most everyone back there. I haven't heard any complaints recently and that's pretty extroardinary for this store. Hopefully it stays that way for a while. We seem to finally have a good crew in place.

That means someone should either be quitting or getting fired anytime now. At least that's how it normally goes.

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I finally got around to taking some pictures of the house. In the next week or so, I'm going to start scanning the pictures up and then put them up on the site for you all to see. I also have current pictures of our two dogs plus the new puppy, Cujo, pictures of the cats, and pictures of every room in the house. Keep in mind, when I say room, I mean the skeleton of each room. There are no walls up yet other than the outside walls.

Shade and Anubis were pretty happy to see me come by and were even happier the second time I showed up to bring them back to the suite. Of course, this was at 2 in the morning since my sister and her boyfriend realized that they didn't have enough gas money to get back to the house. So I had to get up and do it since Shade would spend all night and morning barking and probably get hauled off to the animal shelter.

The ride back was sane enough. Shade kept putting his head out the windows (occasionally drooling on my head as he swung by) and Anubis was just trying to keep his balance while moving around. All in all, the dogs behaved. I was just pissed off about having to do this since I was just about ready for bed. Now, instead, it's 4 in the morning and I'm pretty much screwed when it comes to waking up early tomorrow (this morning) like I wanted to.

I guess it's okay. It could be worse. Oh yeah, Shade got sprayed by a skunk. Nevermind.

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I've been reading this diary of a girl that I just started talking to (an online diary) and she's pretty blunt about things and how she feels. If someone makes her mad, she makes it clear that she's mad, why she's mad, and that she won't just get over it. She's pretty rational about things though.

She's had a lot of bad luck with guys, so in a way, I could relate to how she's feeling and I read her entries with the curiousity of what would she write next. She doesn't always write a whole lot, but sometimes less is more and this is the case with her site.

I haven't been back to it for a couple days now because Internet Explorer keeps crashing and I'm really itching to get my netscape back. I really do not like IE and prefer Netscape 6.2 much more. I guess it's partly because I'm more comfortable with Netscape, but I'm sure my distaste for anything Microsoft has something to do with it as well.

Anyway, it's an interesting diary and her other web site's interesting too. She herself is an interesting girl and hopefully I'll be able to get a hold of her soon to continue to get to know her. We'll see how this goes right now, but I think it would be best if neither of us goes into this with really high expectations. That way, we might avoid some sort of letdown.

Who knows, maybe this time will be the charm? I'll know by the end of the week.