Sunday, February 6, 2011

How I Lost My Shit at the Walgreens

OK, so my blogging frequency has sucked lately. Bloggers often say “Well, I just didn’t have anything to say.” Not my problem. I have plenty to say, and according to most people around me, a bit too much. Time is more my whole issue. So I’m doing once a month, more if I have time. There aren’t any rules, right? I don’t HAVE to do once a week, right? It’s still free content. (plug) Please buy my book.

Last night the headline almost read “Comedian Throttles Walgreen’s Employee For Gross Incompetence And Stupidity At 5:00 Am. And He Was Completely Justified, Other Customers Applaud”

Our two year old finally got Pink Eye. Everyone else in his preschool class had it, so it was only a matter of time. Our doctor called in eye drops to the Walgreens. They couldn’t get it filled for hours and Griffin was already asleep so I would get it in the morning. 4:45 am rolls around and Griffin is up, crying and complaining about his eyes hurting and goo coming out. Fine. Off to the pharmacy I went.

Sadly, the days of the neighborhood pharmacy and competent pharmacy staff are over. Everything is corporatized and lowered down to the cheapest possible way to operate. When I was a kid we had a neighborhood pharmacy and the pharmacist’s name was Burt. He knew you and would help you out. Any problem with a prescription or insurance, he’d take care of it. And, if you can believe it, he knew how to work the cash register.

But I wasn’t going to see Burt. I was going to a corporate pharmacy run by apathetic, lobotomized sloths. I knew I was in trouble when I was waiting for my prescription and the guy in front of me had a problem. He got it resolved.. eventually. My turn. She can’t find the prescription. The woman behind the counter is literally rooting around on the floor for the prescription because everything is in bins because no one has alphabetized them yet. She looks at me, hoping I’ll tell her I’d come back later. No way. I look back and say “Keep looking. My son needs the medicine.”

She finds it. Finally. It’s already been 10 minutes. She tells me it will be $120. I tell her we have insurance. I even give her my card. AGAIN. Not working. She’s typing the numbers in right from the card. Nothing. She FINALLY gets it right, with the manager’s help. Another 10 minutes. The price goes down to $15.

I’m starting to lose it. It’s 5:00 am, I haven’t slept in 10 months due to Griffin’s sleep disorder, my son is suffering because this idiotic woman can’t get her shit together.

She starts to ring it up along with a few tissues and some other small items. I run my card and enter my pin. Her register starts to beep. She looks like a cat after you flash a flashlight into its eyes. She tries again. More beeps. I don’t need my receipt. I can’t take it anymore and lose it. We’re going on 30 minutes now. I tell her “You figure it out. I’m leaving” So I walk out. I hear her call the manager and yell after me that I can’t leave. I keep walking.

It’s then that a little voice in my head says that “Hey, maybe you should stop walking.” So I turned around saw the idiot following me, and I went back with this now hyper stupid person to the pharmacy department.

Turns out this idiot made a perfect sweep of being incompetent, and the transaction didn’t go through at all. So if I hadn’t turned around, I would have been stealing thanks to her moroness. I yelled at her that I didn’t have any more time and my son was sick, and she better get het manager back here immediately.

Now, here’s where it’s going to sound like I’m making it up. Both her and the manager show up, no apology, and neither can get back into the pharmacy department because this idiot didn’t know the combination to the door. It shut and locked behind her when she followed me out.

And apparently the manager didn’t have the combination either. They kept trying. I looked at them like they were the dumbest people in the world, which they probably were. Not because they couldn’t remember the combination, but because IT WAS AN OPEN AIR PHARMACY. I actually had to say “JUST CLIMB OVER THE COUNTER!” That type of security won’t keep out a mildly determined four year old. It’s like locking a screen door.

Now at this point, I know not to call anyone an idiot or stupid, because that would be rude, but here are the names that went through my head at the time: Stupid Stupiderman, Lady Duh Duh, Idiota Moronica, Dommo Arrigato Mrs. Retardo, How are you alive because you are so stupidicus?, Queen Dumbass, and Retardabitch. But I kept them to myself.

Moron Lady climbed over the counter, thank God I made the suggestion, and then let her idiot manager in. They rang me up. Over 40 minutes now. I was ready to let loose on these people, but again, I kept my cool and told the manager, “You need to train your people better.”

The manager calmly replied “she’s a floater”. I paused. The Manager’s response was very telling. Many words were said underneath what she actually said. What she was really saying was, “Like the corporation who employs me, I just don’t give a shit.” She obviously didn’t care that this person had no idea what she was doing, and didn’t care that this idiot behind the pharmacy counter who was normally stocking candy and Slim Jims was in charge of giving out prescription pharmaceuticals. There was no apology, nothing, and it was a little scary. It’s the new corporate strategy: Cutback and hire apathetic morons. Well done.

Ironically, I had originally switched to Walgreens because Rite Aid kept fucking up my prescriptions. Guess the joke’s on me. I miss Burt.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I feel your pain. What a fiasco, and nothing is more annoying than dealing with idiots when your child is sick. I'm shocked, and yet not, that neither one of them thought of jumping over the counter.
That being said, there are still Burts around! We found a "Willy" and his little pharmacy is located near several big corporate dummies and manages to do a booming business just because he still actually cares about the customer. He saved both my parents' lives on different occasions when doctors gave them scripts that messed with their meds. He also had some very good advice when I and my 3 month old had H1N1. Willy can never retire!! I hope you find a Willy or a Burt again!

Anonymous said...

We had a nice, competent 24 hour Sav On nearby, then it morphed into a CVS. Okay, the pharmacy seems pretty well run, but my beef is the music interrupted randomly with LOUD announcements hawking products, which is LOUDEST at the exact spot where you wait to pick up your prescription. Just what you want when you are sick, right? When it was a Sav On, I used to pop in to use the blood pressure machine and buy a lipstick or something. Now I never take my bp there because it's always high because I'm being assaulted by the LOUD announcements hawking products. Has anyone in CVS's corporate hierarchy actually BEEN to a CVS???

baseballmom said...

my dad was a pharmacist who owned a small neighborhood pharmacy, that he bought from his boss...another pharmacist. when i was in high school, he hired my friends and my brother and i to DELIVER prescriptions. he let people 'put it on my tab', and even gave people medicine that couldn't afford it. he had to close his store because walgreen's moved in two blocks away. tragic.

Vodka Mom said...

I was flashing back to George Bailey.


Sorry, I'm back. And you KNEW after you switched, that karma would bite you right when you least expected it, right?

Krissy said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Krissy said...

I love this story mainly because I used to work for Walgreens back in the day. When I got promoted from Photo Tech to Pharm Tech it wasn't an easy transition, mainly because the they stick you in a room for 40 hours and expect you to know the Pharmacy like the back of your hand once the one week classroom training is over. It's impossibile. I demoted myself back to Photo Tech four months later. The Pharmacist only cared about one thing--and that one thing was their $2,000 pay check every two weeks.

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