Pills Baby Pills

I present my prescription to the Publix pharmacy.   Perched at her computer, Jacket Lady frowns at the scrawl for a moment, then, brandishing it slightly, asks, “First time here?”

That fast, and we’re off.  Like the starter’s gun, she sends me racing – pissed off and in the wrong direction.

Does she mean, “Is this the first time you’re filling this here, or is this a refill?”  Or does she mean, “Is this the first time  you’re using the Publix pharmacy?” I consider, and figure it has to be the former.  What’s the significance of my having visited before – if I were buying a loaf of bread and a pack of condoms, the cashier wouldn’t ask that question, would she?  It’s just a transaction, right?

But before I can ask, “You mean me or the prescription?” she says, eyes still fixed on her computer screen (rather than her customer), “Oh, there you are.  I found you.”

So I have it wrong again.  I never get it right.  I just don’t speak the shorthand these assorted semi-professional service people toss about like the general public knows all about it.  It infuriates me that they assume everybody does.  Why can’t they speak in full sentences, and say what they mean?

Then she asks, “Can you confirm your address and telephone number?”

WTF?  I’m buying pills, ferchrissake, not applying for citizenship.  But I’ll play the game because I need the meds.  “I suppose,” I say, and wait for her.  But a moment passes, and  — finally – she actually looks at me.  That’s when I figure out she wants ME to tell HER my address and phone number.  That’s not “confirming” it – asking me to “confirm it”  would mean SHE tells ME what she sees, and I tell HER it’s right (or wrong).   SHE’s confirming the data, not me.

(Sorry to be a competent speaker of the language, but if you’re going to gibber and obfuscate in my direction, we’re going nowhere.  Garbage in, garbage out and all that.)

Okay, so we’re beyond the foreplay.  She asks if I want to wait or come back to pick them up.  How long a wait, I ask.  “Twenty minutes,” she says.  Why does it fucking take 20 minutes to walk over to a large bottle of pills, count out 30, and place them in a small bottle?  I shake my head.   I’ll come back, I tell her.  “We close at 9,” she says.

Hours later Guido calls from her office and asks me if I got my meds.  I tell her No, and she says she’ll pick them up for me on her way home.  Then she calls me from Publix and  says, “They don’t have them in.  Do you want to wait two days, or should I take the prescription somewhere else?”

Wait two days?!  Holy hairy nutsack — Jacket Lady knows she doesn’t have them, and doesn’t call me back right away with this information?  I might have made a return trip maybe just before closing and learned this only then, leaving me no time to find another open pharmacy, desperately hoping it was available elsewhere?  It’s vital I start those meds today – I already had the first part of the treatment  (an injection in the ass, naturally) —  and she can’t be bothered to behave professionally and courteously?

I really resent these people and the way they conduct what laughably passes for health care in this country that half the nation is so wrought up over changing.   It might as well be a loaf of bread and a package of condoms at stake here, not some poor bastard’s fucking cancer.  It’s just product and profit unblemished by any sense of patient care or  professional ethics.  They manage to prove this each and every time I have to interface with them.

Bitch.  Cunt.  Selfish brain dead capitalist tool.  Hope there’s shit in your bed every morning where a lover’s hard body should be.

Guido retrieves the paperwork and stops at Waldron’s, where the prescription is filled.  It takes them 20 minutes.  Big bottles small bottles.  Must be the industry standard.