Every time I complete another decade of work, I send my old Purdue class ring in to Josten's and have them replace one of the ''diamonds'' with a tiny little ruby. I wear it on my left pinky, so the poor thing is as battered and worn as I feel after a 14 hour shift. Next year I will be having them put in the third ruby. It's gonna be a little off , because of the uneven number of little pinkish red stones, but most people I know would tell you that's probably appropriate.
When I was in college, I used to work half a Saturday at a professional pharmacy. It was a very nice set up, and the owner and his son had a loyal following of customers. I wasn't licensed yet, so I had to work with a pharmacist. Once, on a particularly slow Saturday, we had our technician get into the sling on the Hoyer lift, and we cranked it up as far as it would go. Picture a very large baby being carried by a very unlucky stork. Then, of course, we wouldn't let her down. We let her dangle for awhile before we cranked her down, helped her up, and went back to work, before the boss found out what a bunch of goofballs he had working for him.
The next summer, I worked in a little hospital pharmacy, where the director was a grizzled old veteran of the trade, and a take-no-bullshit kind of guy. Back then, there were 2 ladies who did the billing, and they would write down numbers in a huge ledger, line by line by line. He would challenge them to pick any drug, and he could name the numbers that corresponded to that drug. He was always right, and these were very long sequences of numbers. He owned a powder blue convertible, and every Friday, he would ice down a six pack of beer, put on his Speedo under his cut-off shorts, and motor up to the lake. The beer would be gone by the time he got there. These days, we would call him a functioning alcoholic, but I didn't have sense enough to know it then.
My first job right out of college was at the hospital I was born in. I was thinking about saying something about ''coming full circle'', but then I thought, no, that's only if I would die there. Anyhow, they have torn the place down, now, but it was still there in 1984. There were a few characters in the bunch, and it didn't take long to find out who they were. Apparently I missed working with a really colorful Rph who would crawl up and stand on the med carts they were filling just for fun. He got in trouble for sleeping in his car in the parking garage when he had a back to back shift. They said he would eat food off the trays that people had put on the conveyer to be scraped off and washed. I guess he viewed it as a mobile cornucopia of half-eaten delights.
My next job was at another hospital in town, with about 30 pharmacists and a whole bunch of technicians. We had one pharmacist that would do a '' Charo'' imitation if we bugged her enough. One of the younger pharmacists was heavily into alternative music. He bought a little record (CD) store from an older guy, but he never really made a go of it, so he brought in some of the CD's to give away when he closed. He also volunteered at radio station that played some really weird stuff. ''And that last selection was by the Roche Sisters...''(check them out at www.roches.com). We used to tune the pharmacy radio to his show so we could listen on Friday nights. Some of the guys were pretty into bicycling, until two of the guys got hit by cars in 2 separate incidents. All in all they were a pretty smart and interesting bunch, but hospital wasn't my thing, so I moved on after 2 years.
Next stop was a little clinic pharmacy in the basement of an old building. My boss was a huge guy, picture Herman Munster He even had shoes like Herman's. He grew up in a little town by Lafayette Indiana, and his Mom turned their house into a nursing home. He said once in awhile somebody would die and he would have to take care of the body. He would find guys peeing in the curtains, stuff like that. Probably explained why he was a little different.
Next came 10 years with a little local chain pharmacy. They had been a pretty powerful player in their day, but by the time I went to work for them, they were starting to lose ground to the big chains, and I suspect the last few years were spent just trying to get even so someone would buy them. The old guy I worked with at one of the stores was pretty gruff, but a pretty nice guy all in all. He had little phrases he would say all the time. When the phone rang after close, he would always say ''anybody expecting a phone call? If not, let her ring!'' There was ''the robbery talk'': ''If you ever get robbed, after they leave, lock the front doors and circle the last transaction on the register tape and write 'robbery' on it !'' And the advice about the big patient with a seizure disorder: ''If he goes down, just stay the hell away from him, 'cause you might get hurt!'' He had a real shrew of a wife. I guess one year he was having trouble getting out of the store to go home on Thanksgiving. She called several times, and then, there she was out front of the store, banging on the window and yelling at him to come home, because everybody was ready to eat.
There were a lot of pharmacists through that little chain store. There was a ''cowboy pharmacist'' who used his pharmacy income to supplement his farming and truckdriving, and yes, he wore cowboy boots to work. He also rode a motorcycle, and one time he rode to the store in full leathers to turn off the alarm, and the police thought he was robbing the place until he showed them his pharmacy license. There was an odd little pharmacist who kept a picture of his dobermans in his wallet and went gambling with his Mom at a casino in Michigan all the time. Every time he worked, we had customer complaints, but they wouldn't fire him because he would work any time any where at the drop of a hat. There was an alcoholic who finally pushed it too far, and the manager had me come in and relieve him, and she sent him home. He was upset with her , but the smell of alcohol on him was pretty obvious.
Now that I work for a big chain, the rugged individualists are either gone or have gone underground. Individuality and independent thinking are not valued by the chains, so pharmacists learn to tone it down and ''dummy up'' for fear of drawing the wrong kind of attention to themselves from Big Brother. We are all kind of vanilla now, not even gourmet vanilla with the little black specks, but ice milk, really, bland and boring and compliant.
Next installment, Part II, the Technicians.......
BP
.
Entertaining read my friend! Keep up the writing!
ReplyDelete