But I’m Just a Tech!!

It really bothers me that teenagers have no common sense. I am a member of a forum community where teenage illiteracy, stupidity and lack of common sense abounds. They will announce who they’re dating… who they’re no longer dating, give details about their entire sexual lives etc. There are very many of these people who ARE very intelligent and have worthwhile, valid opinions and questions, which is mainly the reason I frequent those forums.

What bothers me the most, though, is those kids who have serious medical questions or questions about their medications. My response is ALWAYS ” call your doctor or pharmacist.” Most of them reply in a snarky manner about how they don’t want to waste their time by having to wait on hold… or how they are shy and can’t ask a question like that (whatever the question might be). This makes little sense to me, as it often takes hours to get a response to a thread. It would be like.. Asking the counter girl at Mcdonald’s how to make prime rib. You can get good reliable medical advice from your local pharmacist in probably under 5 minutes…. but only if you call.

A pharmacist is going to be able to tell you if you’re safe to have unprotected sex if you’ve missed pills out of your pack 9 days ago. A pharmacist can tell you if nausea, heartburn, indigestion, upset stomach, diarrhea is a side effect of your new antidepressant. It doesn’t even have to be YOUR pharmacist. If you are too shy to ask someone you have to see in person again, call another pharmacy. I don’t think he or she is going to laugh at you if you want to know in layman’s terms how your Paxil is making you feel better, or what will happen if you miss a dose or two of your blood pressure medication.

I am sure that the fine members of our forum community can give valuable opinions and experiences about how certain things have affected them. Unfortunately, their opinion is just that… an opinion, and not necessarily hard cold medical facts. Maybe THEY missed 2 pills out of a pack and had unprotected sex 8 days later and didn’t get pregnant. That doesn’t mean YOU won’t… they just got lucky. Medications affect each and every person in a different way, and what one person experiences may not be what happens to the next person. Having other people’s experiences are nice.. they gained weight with a depo shot, they didn’t like their skin after this type of pill, their whatever pill made them sleepy. This might help a person make an informed decision when talking to their doctor about side effects of medications they might be prescribed.

Doctors and pharmacists go to school for many years to learn about the human body and how it works… and which medications work for which conditions. You guys get paid the big bucks to share the wealth of your information with those less informed and I am sure it is a big part of the joy in your jobs to share this information with those who want it. I think the pharmacists I work with take immense amounts of pleasure when someone comes to them with questions that actually make them use what they have learned in a practical setting. “Where are the toothpicks?” is not quite what you went to school for, now, is it?

I understand by this entry and the people who might be reading it, I am preaching to the choir. You all know these things, but I had to get it off my chest.

We all know that most doctors have a problem with their penmanship. Illegible prescriptions are commonplace. Then they wonder why we “waste their time” by calling to clarify. One example is at the top of my mind when I am writing this. A doctor at a local medicenter type office that is notoriously busy scribbled out a prescription for a blood pressure medication for a patient. The writing was so bad that we (all 4 of us working that day) couldn’t make out whether it was 10mg or 20mg. The first digit was a squiggly line that could have been either, and since the patient was new to our pharmacy, we couldn’t even hazard a guess by comparing the written RX to what was on file. Phoning the office is a lost cause. They put you on hold for at least 15 minutes before they will even ask who is calling. “Blahblah’s clinic, hold!” click. Generally writing up a fax cover and sending it off will get a response….. in a week.

Anyways, after faxing a copy of the written rx repeatedly and phoning on a daily basis to ask if Dr Scrawl has had a chance to look at our request, we get a phone call. It’s Dr Scrawl himself and the conversation is along these lines:

Dr: So… tell me what you can’t read on this rx?

Pharm:We couldn’t decipher whether this was supposed to be 10mg or 20 mg

Dr: I can’t believe you have wasted MY time by phoning me with this. It’s clearly TEN mg. I took this RX to every other doctor in the clinic AND the pharmacist in the pharmacy next door and they ALL said it was clearly 10mg. Use your heads and stop wasting my time!

(sidenote-all the doctors in this office have equally bad writing, and the pharmacist next door to them would dispense arsenic if they told him to)

The pharmacist who took the call basically said “thank you I will fill 10mg” and hung up and was speechless. If the doctors would take 30 seconds to write each prescription legibly instead of scrawling like kindergarten children, it would save EVERYBODY time… Who wasted the time here?? We did… phoning, holding, faxing, dealing with irate customer who needed their medication and waiting. He did by taking the rx on the go-round of the clinic to see if the other doctors could read it instead of just clarifying it by writing TEN and having it faxed back to us.

On to the reading issue. I cannot count the number of times we have faxed things to doctor’s offices and received a fax back with “ok <insert signature>” Doesn’t matter if we are requesting a simple refill, asking them to submit a special auth to an insurance plan, or have written an essay regarding an interaction, “ok <insert signature>” This means we have to fax them back or phone and say.. “WTF!!!” Welll we don’t really say that, but boy, would I love to!!

One patient I can recall had a long list of medications that she had refilled once every 3 months. The patient would write out the list, take it to her doctor, who would sign the bottom and issue triplicates for the multiple narcotics on the list. What the doctor didn’t pay attention to is the fact that there were several medications listed more than once… there were numerous duplications in drug classifications (who in the world needs 5 different types of laxatives?!) “ok <insert signature>” I guess someone who is taking 1600 oxycontin 80, 400 percocet, and 800 tylenol 4, every 3 months… can’t poop… hell I am surprised she even manages to walk with all those narcs.

Maybe it’s more of spelling problems that peeve me. I am not claiming to be perfect at spelling, nor do I have perfect grammar, but it makes me very irate when I see educated individuals making very simple mistakes. This goes for fellow bloggers, those who comment to them and the general population. I spend a fair amount of my time outside of work online and see many cases of people who would sound incredibly intelligent, if only they would use proper English. It’s very difficult to take someone’s arguments or debates seriously when their spelling or grammar is so horrible, you doubt that English is their primary language.

There are a few reasons I will excuse poor language skills.

1. Having grown up speaking another language and having English as a secondary (or tertiary) language is a good excuse. I know of one gentleman whose native language is not English who can type far more fluently than a majority of teenagers out there, so this really isn’t a valid reason after all. The eduction system in North America really needs to work on enforcing basic spelling and grammar in elementary school.
2. Having poor typing skills is another valid reason. Some people just can’t type to save their souls. These people would benefit from a good spell checker. Some are even built right into the blog sites, or into their web browsers (I love my Firefox!!!). Other times people just type too fast and don’t catch errors. Another example of this is what I like to call “fat finger syndrome”. I sometimes suffer from this when I am very tired, and my fingers hit keys I don’t want them to hit. I wonder why the lettering is worn off my backspace key?
3. Sheer stupidity. This is not an excuse.

There are a few things I find inexcusable when it comes to publishing anything that anyone should be taking somewhat seriously, be it a blog, posting in a forum, or simply writing an email to your friends.

1. Misusing homonyms:- There, they’re, and their; your and you’re; to, too, and two; it’s and its; whose and who’s; you get the idea. This is stuff you should have learned in Grade 3. There is a place, they’re, you’re it’s and who’s are contractions, their, your, its and whose are possessives.
2. Using chat or text lingo in something you want others to take seriously. I don’t care if you have PhD, MD or a million other letters behind your name, if you want me to read it, type out the words. Things like “how r u?” are only acceptable if you are texting me from a cell phone that charges you a buck a letter. To read something like the following excerpt from a blog taken from a medical professional is actually kind of embarrassing.

“if u hav nvr taken it b4 in ur entire lifetime. You, however, would have the answer tho.. or at least in the near future. Its not really my fault when I wun be able to tell you if this medicine will close up ur airways and potentially shut u up forever.”

It’s very hard to take this person’s writing very seriously (even knowing the author is from a non English speaking background)

3. Streetspeak:- by this I mean “gangsta talk”. If you’re not a gangster.. I shouldn’t be hearing you say things like “word up homeboy” and similar phrases. At least in the forum community I frequent, most of the people are white, upper middle class teenagers. None of them are gangsters, gangstas or wiggers, so don’t talk/type like one.

If anyone actually reads this on an ongoing basis, I am sure you could probably find some sort of errors in my logic or in my grammar itself. I am not perfect when it comes to syntax and punctuation and I tend to overuse ellipses… but I like to think that I show that I am an intelligent person by my attention to detail. It’s what makes me a good tech.

I think we all know what I am talking about. We have all had one. Hell, some of us may have at some point in time even BEEN one!! That’s right… a seagull manager. Urban dictionary holds the following entry:

seagull manager manager supervisor

My seagull manager was at my last place of employment. She had come to us courtesy of a demotion from a position at the company’s head office. I think she was somewhat resentful of having to leave a cushy desk job and sitting elbow to elbow with all the head cheeses. She was being replaced by a technician who could do a much better job in the same position for 1/4 of the coin. Now she would actually have to work for her money and toil and slave like the rest of us retail saps. Or would she??

The first day in, she came squawking…everything had to change from a way we were all comfortable with to her way. Her way, or get out. If we all worked her way, nothing would get done. She was (and I suppose still is, wherever she is) a “do as I say, not as I do” person.

Because she was all schmoozy with the RPMs and other head office people no one would dare to question her. This lady simply did whatever she wanted, preaching company policy to us, yet blatantly disregarding her own sermons. I will give you an example of this. One of her biggest lectures to us was about our customer service standards. The company sets out certain behaviors that we are to follow and regularly sends secret shoppers in to test us out. Technicians may be shopped, and the shoppers are trained to look for different things for a tech and a pharmacist. The techs must offer the services of a pharmacist in all cases, and for anything that demands more than a “item x is right here, there is a 18 pack and a 40 pack in both brand and our store brand” requires us techs to have a pharmacist come and give drug information, recommendations etc. One day I had a lady approach me at the in counter and ask me for the “best cold medicine” I told her I would have to have a pharmacist come out front and give her a recommendation based on the symptoms she wanted to treat. There were, at the time 5 pharmacists in the store. One in the back doing nursing home work, another at the till counseling, and two in the middle of checking scripts… and seagull… she was reading her emails. I asked her (as she was the least occupied with critical tasks) if she would mind going to give a recommendation. She put up her finger in my face and said “I am busy.. in a minute”

What the bloody hell?? That customer will walk out… your email will still be there in 2 minutes!! Meanwhile I am left holding the bag… “she’ll be right out with you.. sorry for the delay.” Someone else ended up helping that lady. Customers were definitely NOT her first priority!

I also wondered why it was acceptable for her to go on hour and half long breaks.. to go to the gym, the hair dresser, the nail salon, while if we were more than a few minutes overdue on our breaks, it was grounds for discipline. She would take 3 hours to slap together a schedule for one week. Schedules were supposed to be posted at least THREE weeks in advance. Some people have family lives to arrange around their work schedules and having a schedule for the week posted only the Friday before was disruptive. Requests for time off were virtually ignored. Most times she would take her paper work/schedules home with her during the work day saying it was the only place she could work undisturbed…. or claim she would come in before the store was open to get it done and then leave early to make up for it.

I dreaded having to go to work when it was just herself and me. She had no concept of time management, or any sort of priorities. If she was the only pharmacist in the pharmacy at the time, even if there were very few scripts to process, we learned to tack an extra 10 minutes (at least) on to pick up times to accommodate her flitting around to all corners of the dispensary doing god knows what. She certainly wasn’t checking rxs! If there were more than 2 pharmacists there at one time, we usually had a work flow established and each person found themselves a station and stayed there. She would plant herself as far away from actual work as she could. There were days when I would have 6, 9 or even 12 screens plugged with overrides to do, and she would ignore our pleas for them to be done.. flapping her hands as she would run around on unknown (but very important) tasks. Other days, we would be happily plugging along, typing in rxs. Usually when we have a screen full ( 3 tabs) we would call for overrides and continue entering on the other screen, by which time the overrides would be done on the first one and we could seamlessly trade sides and continue working. Every other pharmacist understood this pattern and followed through with overriding as required. Not her!! She would flap her way by and pretty much shoulder you aside to do ONE override while you have a stack of scripts in hand, then flap away again leaving everyone in her wake…. staring…shaking our heads.

This lady almost caused me to abandon my chosen field of work. I left that pharmacy on almost a daily basis wondering why the hell I put up with it. Now, I am very glad I stuck out the few months until I could get a transfer to another store. Reading over what I have typed out here… doesn’t seem so bad, but dealing with this type of incompetence on a daily basis was enough to drive one mad. All the little things added up to be one great big hassle.

We had a very odd call today. Usually I answer the phone first, so I always get to put people on hold or screen calls for the pharmacists. Today’s odd call went something like this.

Me: Good morning, Thanks for calling Pharmacy X this is JustATech.

Them : Can I speak to pharmacist M, please?

Me: She’s not here today, may I take a message?

Them: (indignantly) Well someone yesterday told me that Pharmacist M would be there today!! I needed to talk to her.

Me: I can take a message and have her call you back. She’ll be here Monday.

Them: No.. I really needed to talk to HER. She is the Asthma specialist..I really need to talk to her.

Me: Well, while our other pharmacists don’t have the specialized asthma training, I am sure they would be more than capable of answering your questions. Can I put you on hold for Pharmacist V?

Them: *sigh* I guess…

Pharmacist V answers the call and promptly rolls her eyes at me and keeps saying yes… yes… mhmmm ok.

Turns out that the patient will be leaving the country for a few months and needed her epinephrine injector refilled (and make SURE it has the longest availabe expiry date on it s’il vous plait!!!) and for us to call her doctor for a refill on her blood pressure medication. If she had just asked one of the others in the pharmacy on Wednesday for these things, we could have ordered the product and faxed the doctor and had a reply before the weekend. We had to place a same day order for the injector (the ones we have on the shelf expire in less than a month.. don’t get me started on returning expiries!!). It’s not likely that we will have heard back from the doctor about the BP meds today, either. Let’s hope she isn’t leaving this weekend.

I realize that I am just a technician, but both of these things are duties that I could have handled with the very first phone call the patient had made to our pharmacy days ago while looking for pharmacist M. The question had nothing to do with asthma, nor was it something that a pharmacist needed to answer… let alone one pharmacist in particular. Being loyal to one pharmacist or another is understandable, if a patient has built up a rapport with that particular person. We had many many customers follow M to our location from her previous store. She is a joy to deal with and always goes above and beyond for everyone, and never has a bad thing to say. As a matter of fact.. all the people I work with go above and beyond. The specialized training does give a definite edge to M when dealing with asthma patients, but every one of us who works there will make sure that if we don’t know the answers to questions, we will find out.

After that.. I got a call from the s/o to please come drive him to the hospital, and sat around in a waiting room most of the afternoon. If anyone out there has more information about fancy treatments for optic neuritis besides corticosteroids….. drop me a line…. specialized opthalmic pharmacists only, please!!<insert tongue in cheek>.

Yes… cats…

Why does my one cat only ever come to see me and get affectionate when I am either in the bathtub or on the toilet? Is it because I am a captive audience and can’t get up and run after him without a lot of extra effort? And what is so appealing about drinking my bathwater while I am in the tub? There is a full bowl of fresh water just outside the door. I guess I must taste good! I also don’t appreciate you dangling your tail in there.. wet cat hair sticking to my body parts is neither attractive nor comfortable.

Why do my cats need to wait until I am in the kitchen to eat the food I put in their bowls hours ago? Why do they wait until I am next to their litter box to scratch and make messes? Are they showing off? “Hey, lookit me!! I can poop!! Be proud!!”

Why do they have to vomit on the carpet? They are 2 inches from the linoleum where cleaning it up is a breeze. But, NOOOOOOOOOOOO they have to turn their cute little heads and upchuck right on my off- white berber carpet. Little savages! And to top that off, the food they have to have (due to a urinary condition in my male cat) is an atrocious, incredibly noxious yellow color, so that when it does land on my carpet it makes horrible stains if you don’t get to it right away. Unlike the pooping, most times they wait until I leave to puke, so the stain is well set by the time I find it (usually with my bare foot and no glasses on).

I also just want to mention that today is the first day of school. People need to drive a little bit more considerately on a day like today. I realize we are all probably late because of the huge change in the traffic patterns, but for goodness sake, if you can’t make it all the way through an intersection (especially an uncontrolled one) don’t enter it!!! The people who want to turn left across your lanes of traffic will love you because you are being considerate. And if someone is nice enough to stop for you, or let you into their lane when traffic is backed up, smile and wave a thank you! And those big signs proclaiming “FREE FLOW LANE” mean you don’t have to yield or stop when exiting onto the freeway… those lanes just keep on going. So can you! What has society come to when common courtesy has disappeared just because little Timmy has to be to school and Mommy or Daddy didn’t leave early enough to compensate for the extra traffic.

/endrant

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