If people who hacked into other’s accounts spend half their efforts into legit careers we’d probably be all better off. To any of you who have received a spammy email from Pharmacy Chick, my apologies. I was hacked. And to those of you who took the time to notify me, THANK YOU! Iappreciated every one of them.
My best wishes to all!
I think humans are the master of their own demise. Pharmacy Chick is an angry pharmacist..but “Angry Pharmacist” is taken so PC I will stay. Some months back my company announced yet another round of labor cuts….right after they sent out glowing notices of how awesome we were doing….meeting all my sales goals…having a 4% gain for the year when most businesses were tanking. I decided to answer back in a very small way. I quit shopping at the company that I work for. Yea, I suppose for some people that is sacrilegious but for me, as a CONSUMER, if I dont like a company I dont shop there. It just happens that I work there.
This nation has a ton of unemployed and under-employed people. People are screaming for job creators. But I can tell you this. Industry does not want to create jobs. Jobs are for humans…humans are labor…and labor is their #1 controllable expense. They want to LIMIT jobs to create more profit. Say you work for United Twaddlers and Widgets. If you are the company president with a bunch of shareholders to please with dividends, you want to make as many Twaddlers and Widgets as you can as cheaply as possible. If that means automation, and less humans, they will jump on it like frog off a rock.
We have seen this all over. People dont make cars..robots do. Checkers don’t ring you out at grocery stores, ”Self Check Out” stations do. You buy your bus tickets at a kiosk. You check in for your flight at a kiosk. Kiosks aren’t paid, dont need lunches or breaks and aren’t subject to labor laws, need health insurance or injure themselves on the job. This is what companies seem to think is their future…NO LABOR.
There is one small problem with this frame of thought….Every company is making SOMETHING they want to sell. Twaddlers and Widgets needs to sell their inventory to make any money. Grocery stores need to sell groceries etc etc etc…
Who buys stuff? WE DO!! Humans with money….money they get only by having a job….WE buy the widgets, the twaddlers, the groceries, the plane tickets….all the stuff that industry wants to make without any humans around anymore. You cannot make consumables without considering that customers must have money to buy them!!
On my own personal small level…I am in charge of 5 people…myself included. 3 of the people are techs. They are valuable to me and I care for them. The company doesn’t care about them one bit. Each week I write a schedule that flexes…Flex labor is what we call it. We have to monitor script count every day to meet certain goals. If we fall short of daily projections, people go home. It bothers me that some weeks my very valuable staff have fewer hours than they need to pay their bills because we didn’t meet the script count.
Rent doesnt flex. Car payments dont flex. My part time tech told me over the weekend he loves working for me but he cannot afford these flex hours. He needs a paycheck that is not only regular but MORE. I told him I understand. he knows the ugly position I am in. Its black and white. He sees the labor chart posted in the pharmacy. X scrips =Y hours. ONly now its X scripts =Y-4 less hours.
What does that mean? To customers it means you will wait longer for your prescriptions. We already work at our safety limits. We are at the “angle of repose” when it comes to safety..and if you dont know what that is…look it up and it will make sense. Its similar to a “tipping point”.
My partner and I donate labor hours so that our techs get more. We donate our time so that the store opens on time because they feel its appropriate to schedule your labor hours for only the time you are OPEN. They consider it wasteful to schedule somebody early. Ever try to open a business at 9 am by arriving at 859? doesn’t work….We have 4 computers to launch, a cash pan to retrieve, an order that is delivered before we open, and a queue that is often loaded to triple digits full of scripts.
When I started working for this company the pharmacy was open 58 hours a week and we had 2 pharmacists and 2 techs. We are now at 78 hours a week with 2 pharmacists and 2.25 techs.
I am labor. Their number # 1 controllable expense. Fine. But I control the shrinking dollars I have left after my bills are paid and they wont be going back into MY store till anymore.
Its amusing how Pharmacy Chick attracts morons like a light attracts flies. Case in point. This guy comes hobbling in, leans over the counter and seeing both myself and my tech on the phone yells ” ANYBODY HERE?” . when I hang up he hands tosses a script for some oxycodone on the counter telling me its ” comp”. ( short for workman’s comp). WC encompasses about a dozen different options, so ” comp” isn’t a blanket statement. We have a State comp plan, and a whole bunch of private comp plans. Each worker is given a claim number and billing instructions after their claim is established and approved. Most are given a rx card if their injury is chronic or long term. ” Richard Head”, correct? Yea, but I go by Dick. Ok, Dick Head, what is your Date of Birth ..which he provides.. Your address…which he provides..any allergies we should profile for you? he huffs a bit…NO…how long is this going to take?
I ignore that comment and ask him for his Accident Fund card if he has one. Are you listening to me? how long is this going to take? Up to a half hour, longer if you dont have your insurance. Dick. Yea, well, you can call my pharmacy in ( town on opposite side of state) THEY got it there MAN.
You got their phone number? No, isnt’ that what you gotta computer for? Cant you just look me up? Well, since you haven’t been to any PC Pharmacies in the nation, you aren’t IN my computer and I have no access to your local pharmacy information. But if you give me the pharmacy phone number I can request your insurance information. Look, that aint my job.
I dont think we are gonna be able to help you today Dick.
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Phone Rings and I answer it. A little old lady asks for the pharmacist and I confirm that I am the pharmacist. She asks ” Is there a little bug going around”. OMG…she is back…( head on the counter) …this lady calls every pharmacy around asking if there is a bug going around…and since she forgets WHO she called, she calls BACK and asks again! Its been a few months since her daily calls started so I had hoped that either the bug finally GOT her or she quit calling. I just say ” NOPE, nothing that I know of”…( frankly, even if ebola was rampant in my town, I wouldn’t tell her!)
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A script is called in for a dog, for diazepam…for separation anxiety I suppose. The owner, a young man picks it up and I am doing the counselling when he asks ” So, what if I take it? Without a beat, I said ” Then your Dog wont get any I suppose…”
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And on that same Vein, a lady calls me up and asks me if she should call poison control since her toddler ate a few pieces of dog food. I told her that while in some cases human food can poison a dog, I know of no cases where a few kernels of dry dog food can poison a human.
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I was doing a special counselling session at the request of a doctor, showing a patient how to load and use a Lantus Solostar. ” You screw on the needle like so, turn the handle to X units and pinch a bit of skin like this ( I lift my shirt to show a bit of tummy–which I tell him about) and then you will inject…etc etc” ….He was bummed at me because I didn’t ACTUALLY inject myself. I thought he was kidding…he wasn’t.
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Its spring break so there are kids everywhere, small and teens. A couple of punks are milling around the blood pressure machine. they delight in bugging each other and making a bunch of noise…both of which piss me off. One asks me ” so, how many Percocets does it take to kill ya?” Just one if you rip off your drug dealer.
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And just when you think its safe to go into the water: The phone rings and its the deaf relay service: some guy wants to buy 100 boxes of glucose test strips with a credit card and have me mail it. REALLY? does anybody fall for that scam?
Is it closing time YET?
Pharmacy Chick is not a trademarked name, its just a name that I came up with to blog under. Obviously using my real name wouldn’t work since I blog anonymously but I needed something. It was brought to my attention recently that somebody is selling merchandise under the name Pharmacy Chick….stuff like T-Shirts, mugs stuff like that.
Just want to make it public knowledge that I, the blogger Pharmacy Chick, am not selling merchandise. I blog for my personal entertainment and stress reduction–tho some of the commenters just add to it! LOL..
So, if in your Google searches you see Pharmacy Chick stuff for sale, please know that it is not from ME and you arent supporting any of my endeavors or padding my pockets. The small business that Mr Chick and I started is NOT selling stuff like that. I dont care that she is selling shirts, etc because 1) nobody owns the name and 2) he/she doesn’t make any claims towards the blog….which is such an tiny influence on the internet that making a claim like that would be fruitless anyway!
I love being PC, but I dont need to see my name on anybody’s chest!
This isn’t my story. This is actually the story of another pharmacist. I am only relaying the story…in first person. ( I changed a few details to protect his privacy/identity)
I owned a pharmacy for many years. It was a good living and provided well for my family. I was getting ready to “retire” and move on, but none of my 4 kids were pharmacists and were not interested in owning a pharmacy so selling to my children was not an option. I had been approached by Big Box pharmacy to purchase my business so I worked out a deal. I wasn’t completely ready to retire so I agreed to work for Big Box, and they promised to take all of my employees who wanted to stay on. I was the “manager”. I was told “very little would change” so that the transition would be easy for both the employees and the customers.
We were trained on their new computer system, given support with employees experienced with the system, and literally overnight I went from He-who-must-be-obeyed to He-who-must-obey. I no longer signed the paychecks…I received a paycheck. We were given the dress code requirements, told precisely how to answer the phone and what the new chain of command would be. ” we are only a phone call away” the sweet regional manager said. ” call me anytime! I am here to help”.
Somethings were nice…when I locked up at night, it wasn’t my problem. I had a fairly large sum of money in my bank account, but it wasn’t me I was concerned about. My employees werent adjusting all that well. Scheduling became an issue. The schedule that I would write every week wasn’t good enough anymore. I was told I was using too many labor hours even tho we had to stay open later than we had when I owned the store. None of my people had ever had to work past 7 pm and now I had to make them work until 10. Nearly all the “help” they gave us disappeared after the first 2 weeks. My best technician told me she was going to quit because she couldn’t work the late hours. Her day care center charged her extra for anything after 6 pm and she couldn’t afford the fees. I called our regional manager but “it was out of her hands”
After a month, they cut my pharmacists hours to ZERO overlap. We had been using 2 full time pharmacists and a 3/4 time pharmacist. They moved my 3/4 time pharmacist to the float pool, which made her pretty mad since she has two school age kids and needed some kind of regular schedule. We were only supposed to work 8 hours at a time but if somebody was sick and no help was found, they expected us to stay all day. Im 62 years old. I am not used to standing on my feet for nearly 14 hours. I wanted health insurance that was affordable so I kept working. They had flooded the market with coupons to entice people to transfer to our “new” store, and sure, my numbers went up, but so did the wait times and a lot of the customers I had for the last 30 some years began to grumble. It was no longer their community pharmacy. They were absolutely right.
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He quit after about 6 months and decided to do some work at our company, in a different state. His relo package required he work for 2 years to keep his signing bonus and moving bills paid.. He was relocated to some Godforsaken small town where the tumbleweeds outnumbered the cars. It was the largest store in town so they had the “corner on the market” he said.
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he says: I didn’t think it could be worse but it was. We closed earlier, but everything I did was micromanaged. I wasn’t a “former owner”, I was just an employee to be controlled. I was given projections each week that I was expected to achieve. I am old school, I really am… so when I was required to go to a class to give vaccinations, I was not thrilled. I managed to push it off for a while, but I eventually couldnt dodge it anymore. I was not a good at giving shots I literally had to will my hands not to shake. If I was a customer, I wouldn’t have wanted somebody like me giving me a shot!
My manager was nearly 1/3rd my age, having been out of pharmacy school for only a year. She was nice, but had no idea how to be a leader, talk to customers, or manage employees. She was brilliant with her technical drug knowledge but completely ignorant in many other things. She was offended when older people wanted to talk to me. She treated me like an old codger.
The company rules were oppressive…a long list of tasks to do, reports to keep, forms to fill out each day-week-month, and insufficient time to do it. Tho it was officially against the rules to work off the clock, they knew we had to do it to keep up with their requirements and since we had only a certain amount of dollars we could spend each week on labor, we were really locked between a rock and hard space. They even scheduled meetings we had to attend but said we couldn’t submit for pay for the time to attend them ( which I was sure was against the rules), but when I protested , I was told because it was listed in our job requirements it wasn’t required to be paid time. To this day I am sure some rules were being broken, but I can’t prove it.
I dont understand…Why do they hate us?
This profession has fallen so far that its not recognizable to what it was when I started. Patient care has been replaced with performance goals for Script counts, labor models, inventory limits, and vaccination quotas.
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He quit precisely 2 years and 1 day after his contract expired. He moved himself and his wife to a small retirement community and retired his license. ” I am not rich, but I have enough. 2 years and 6 months of corporate pharmacy took more years off my life than the 30 years I owned my own business.
” Get out when you can, kiddo”. That’s advice I plan on taking my friend….its that ” when you can” thats a little cloudy in the crystal ball….
Almost no post I have ever written has been so misunderstood that the post I wrote Sept 10 2010 about a misfill that occurred at a different pharmacy. I knew it was a mis filled prescription because I happened to have seen the hardcopy earlier in the day. The post was about a script brought in for Oxycodone 30mg tabs and because I didnt’ have it, I sent her elsewhere. She (for some reason unknown to me) called me back later because the tabs she had received looked a lot different than what she had received before. She had never been MY patient so it still confounds ME why she called me. To make a long story short, she had been given Oxycontin 30mg intead of immediate release oxycodone. Its an error anybody could make if they didn’t read the script correctly, but one that any pharmacist should catch right way when the directions didn’t match the release form of the med. One would not take CONTIN every 4 hours.
Now I suspect if I had written about Metoprolol, or Depakote, or any number of drugs that have IR and CR formulations, this post would have been about as ho-hum as it gets, BUT because I wrote about a narcotic, nearly every comment turned into a public commentary on narcotic drug use with people posturing on both sides and slamming the entire profession of pharmacy ( and me) that included a lot of name calling and accusations. The most recent was some guy named Bill, who descended into Chick-bashing by calling me a apartment-dwelling-cat-loving-people-hating technician.
So, Bill T, pardon my language, but you are an ass with a huge chip on your shoulder. READ the POST. Then READ IT AGAIN. Leave the comments out of it. I didn’t write the comments, other people did. Maybe your attitude is your own Karma.
Leave me out of it. You owe me one serious apology Bill.
I would imagine if you think about it, you might agree with me. Look around the next time you are out and about. Everybody seems to have a beverage in their hands. Im not kidding. It seems everywhere I go, somebody has some kind of beverage container in their hands. I go to church on Sunday mornings and people have coffee cups, and beverage holders, and invariably our relatively new carpet has beverage stains on it already from spillage of said beverage.
What is it about some people that they can’t go 20 minutes without sucking on a drink? My best friend is among this group. She brings some beverage everywhere she goes…and much to her husbands dismay, often tips it over. Because she is a lover of a straw, she won’t buy a spillproof cup so she keeps tipping her cups everywhere. I dont care what she spills on HER carpet, but I kinda mind what she spills on MINE.
What brings me to this post is something that happened last week in the pharmacy. The tech was checking out this lady who was paying for her prescription. She came in with one of those giant plastic cups that (presumably) you bring into a restaurant and they will refill it for some reduced price. To me it looked like a pail…with a handle on the side. I was in the counting area when I heard a shriek and then ” OMG I am SO SORRY!” then the tech took off to grab as many towels as possible. This stupid woman had tipped it over ( the lid popped off) and sticky soda was running all over my pharmacy counter like a brown river. It took nearly a whole roll to clean up the sticky mess and pretty much stopped the checkout line for 10 min.
A few months prior, we had a relief pharmacist who tried ( unsuccessfully) to balance her own beverage on the cash pan, and tipped it over and flooded the entire contents of the cash pan with coke. The book keeper was not thrilled. I heard all about it the next day.
Another time, a year or so ago, a different relief pharmacist tipped over her Jamba Juice on my computer key pad..completely ruined it.
In the pharmacy I have a rule: NO beverages on the dispensing counter. Any beverage that is not in a screw top container may only be consumed by the sink…far away from any drug products. Some companies I have heard actually BAN any beverages in the pharmacy. THAT is a bit extreme when you consider we work without a lunch or break. Take away my coke and you may have violence on your hands. Somedays that coke is the only nutrition this pharmacist gets. Sad, but true. Nevertheless I dont need to be sucking on that coke 24-7…and I dont haul it with me on every errand, and usually the only thing thats in my cup holder in my car is some loose change , a chapstick, and a blue tooth headset with a dead battery.
One of my pharmacist friends works for a clinic style pharmacy that did a major remodel. They enlarged their waiting room, put in a couch, some fancy chairs, a TV, ( and get this) a CARPETED floor. They wanted to copy the environment of the dr’s offices up stairs I guess. The pharmacy is lovely, with muted blues and greys, and very calming. They hung a sign: No Food or Drink ( in english and spanish). The pharmacy manager said they barely had the carpet down a week when somebody spilled a coffee beverage on the carpet. Apparently the sign didn’t apply to her.
Leave your cups in the car…you aren’t going to die of dehydration. I promise.
I am a little righteously indignated this morning ( if thats even a word.). If you are involved in the world of pharmacy you know that drug shortages and back orders are more commonplace than they used to be. I never have an answer for this. We are the USA after all. This isnt Berzerkistan. Over the last few months Doxycycline has been in ever shorter and shorter supply and eventually I ran out of all Doxy Hyclate 50 and 100mg tabs and caps. This is pretty huge because we use a lot of that med on a daily basis.
If we have found it at a competitor, we have sent it there, and likewise, they have sent to us if we happened to have scored a bottle. Last Friday and yesterday we got out first real shipment in: 2 bottles from Mutual Pharmaceuticals and 1 from Westward…..at $2300 and 2000 apiece for a bottle of 500. WHAAAAT??? This is a cheap product that used to be under 50 bucks for the 500ct.
Can you say PRICE GOUGING ?
I dare you to respond…any of you in the industry! I point my finger to your overstuffed shirt, and accuse you of collusion, price fixing, price gouging…whatever. You have no ethics whatsoever.
I havent opened any of these bottles and in my opinion they dont exist. I tried to refill ( and bill) a rx to an insurance for this and when I sent my cost of 139.00 for 60 tabs, it came back with a reimbursement of 5.28. NOPE. not gonna happen.
I hate you Mutual and Westward. you are a used kleenex in my mind.
I think everybody in their job has this happen to them at some point in their career. For me, I was listening to a sermon at church ( for any new readers I have..I am an evangelical Christian pharmacist), and it focused on LOVE. It wasn’t about the love men and women have for each other, but the love we Christians are supposed to have and share with each other. We hear songs all the time ” You will know we are Christians by our LOVE…etc” . We manifest Christ’s love for US by loving other people. yada yada yada.
I had an epiphany at that sermon. I dont LOVE most people anymore. I am pretty sure it has been beaten out of me after 26 years of retail pharmacy. Any fire of Love that burned inside of me is a mere flicker anymore, I am convicted. I’m embarrassed to admit that am feeling rather dead right now. I am pretty good at hiding it, and faking it very well at work. I am hippity hop bubbly at work, run my butt off all day making people happy, but if the truth be revealed (and I am pretty sure God can read the heart), I just dont care right now. Once I walk out the door, I DONT CARE.
What I do is more for self preservation ( dont yell at me again) than LOVE ( I do this because I care about you). I just dont have any ambition to care about customers anymore.
Sometimes my dead side seeps to the surface. Some lady was pissing at the counter because ” EVERY TIME I COME HERE YOU SAY YOU DONT HAVE A PRESCRIPTION FOR ME! I KNOW HE CALLED IT IN”. Well it turned out they called one of our competitors because she is a pharmacy shopper…she goes to several pharmacies. I really wanted to let her have it..WOULD YOU LIKE TO APOLOGIZE TO ME FOR YOUR RUDENESS”.. ( like I can ever actually get away with THAT?) I did however make her very aware WHERE the script was called in and by whom…and it wasn’t HERE..and I made her wait extra long for it. No, I cant talk back, but I can make her wait.
A little bit of me dies every day I go to work. I have a small group that meets in my house every couple of weeks. We all attend the same church and have been meeting for years. Of the 15 of us, I am the only person who works in a retail setting. Most are engineers ( never talk to the public), a couple work in the school system, and a few are stay at home mothers. I am not saying that any of them have it any easier of a JOB than I do, but its different. Every one of them interact with the same core group of people every day. I encounter whatever walks up to the counter. It can be an emotional crapshoot.
Well I am crapped out. ( to use a gambling term I guess). Going on vacation fails to refuel me, If anything it fuels my desire to leave the profession. We are so busy, going to work is like being in a hot crucible. My company talks out of both sides of their mouths ” we value you…but not enough to give you time to rest, pee or eat, and oh by the way, cut your labor by another 10%) and clearly what I do is never good enough.
I am not a mind reader. I can’t GUESS what the new processor is on somebodys 2013 insurance card, so tossing a tantrum at my counter wont change anything, but when you get home, I hope you feel really stupid when you get my courtesy message reminding you to bring in your new card. I dont care.
I cannot manufacture drugs. If something is out of stock at the wholesaler I can’t just DIVINE it into the pharmacy because a customer yells at me. I just dont care what is in or out of backorder anymore. If I have it…super…if I dont…well, I DONT.
I cannot control a doctor. He will ok a waiting refill whenever he damn well chooses. Not on my demand…or yours either BTW, so whatever…
I cannot control my workload so when you bring me a script and I tell you it will take 40 minutes, and you dont like that, doesn’t change the ugly fact that 15 people beat you to my counter.
It goes on and on…It makes me sad that I feel this way. Its not my nature. My mother called me her “sensitive one”. Its like somebody poured Lidocaine all over my heart. Its completely numb.
I mourn the death of the caring person I used to be.
And so it goes…….
I appears that lots of people have taken my advice and have received their flu shots. I had no idea I had so many local readers! haha. Over the last 4 days my store alone have given 200+ shots, and I gave 61 of them myself on thursday alone. It was one of those days where I had 13 hours on my feet with no break, no lunch, no rest, no potty. And when you consider I had to run the pharmacy and check all the rxs…well you can guess it was a loooooong day…and I gave flu shots all night in my sleep…
More of the people getting their shots THIS time of year are cash payers: those who didn’t feel it was worth getting a shot unless they thought they felt a real risk I guess. for the most part, those who came calling for flu shots would have taken a shot delivered with a old rusty needle and given by the deli clerk if it meant they were immunized. The calls start as soon as the phones open for the day and pretty much continue til we are closed. ” do you have flu shots??” Yes, we do, come in between the hours of X and X and you can receive a shot..allow up to 3o minutes”.
Until the middle of this week we had Hi Dose, ID, Nasal and regular. Now I got “nuttin honey”. We are out. nada…nothing but an empty tray.
So this lady calls on Thursday. She wants to know if we had flu shots, and we answered with an affirmative, and gave her the usual spiel. She wanted to know if we had preservative free, which we did not. That went out of stock some time ago, and we had only received about 20 doses anyway since the request for it is pretty low. You would think ( or HOPE) that the answer NO would be enough. But NOOOO, we had to argue. ” WHY NOT?”. ” CAN YOU GET SOME?” ” I HAVE TO HAVE IT”.
Unbelievable. I was only able to hear the tech’s side of this conversation but it didnt’ take a genius to figure it out…especially when I got the hilarious blow by blow by tech extraordinare afterwards.
Ever patient, my new tech just kept repeating ” we have what we have, if you want a flu shot, you better come soon, they are going fast.”
Her response to end the call? ” well, not if you are going to poison me!”
And a happy day to you too.