It was a slower day in my corner pharmacy, a snowstorm that had been forecast the night before was raging outside. Well, okay, not quite raging the way I'd hoped, but it was bad enough that people were going straight home after work. Most people.

You always have to keep track of the people in line at the pharmacy. It's as much about gauging their body language as it is trying to give great customer service, and as I tell the man at the register his total ($1.00 for two prescriptions), I notice that the lady behind him is almost scowling. He pays, and scowling lady (may as well call her SL from now on) is almost glaring at him as he walks away with his pills. She looked like she could be the Grinch, if the Grinch wore a puffy pink jacket and a baseball cap, and somehow seemed more grumpy than he was in the Dr. Seuss book. As she steps up to the register and makes sure he's out of earshot, she asks, upset, "Why is his stuff 50 cents each, when mine costs $50?"

Immediately, I'm a little nervous with this encounter, and I chuckle a bit and shake my head to try to clear the tension. It didn't help - SL was still... well, scowling. I give my standard spiel, "Insurance is a fickle beast," and pull her up in the system. Two name-brand medications, one $50, the other something like $55 or $60. I go to get the prescriptions, and SL is still going on about how frustrating it is to pay so much for her insurance every month, pay money to see a doctor, and then have to pay so much for her medication, and all the Whos down in Whoville are so happy and merry with their cheap prescriptions.

It's a scenario we've all dealt with so many times, but as I pull these prescriptions I notice that there's no coupon applied to either. So I ask, "Miss SL, have you ever applied for a manufacturer coupon for your prescriptions?"

Well, that stops SL cold. You could hear the Grinch trying to decide whether this was just another one of the Who-men and Who-women's festive tricks. She finally admits that no, she hasn't heard of coupons, what are those?

So, seeing that there's no one else on line at pick-up, and no one else in the store at all really, I bring SL over to the other counter where I can access our intranet and search for manufacturer's coupons. And wouldn't you know it, both of these medications have one!

Even as we're applying for the manufacturer's coupons and getting both approved and printed, I'm bracing myself for the potential that SL is going to take all the Christmas cookies and brand meds back to Mount Crumpit with her and complain that she never got these coupons before. I start preparing explanations and excuses for my coworkers who didn't do it before, just waiting...

But the anger never came. $100 in copays comes down to $25, and SL is beyond grateful. She goes and gets herself a pint of ice cream to add to the order as I start ringing everything back through, and every time I tell her the total (she even had a $2 coupon for the ice cream) she reiterates how grateful she is and just shakes her head and says, "Wow."

It was then, as SL thanked me for the tenth time and walked away from the counter, that I realized that maybe I was the grinch the whole time. My heart grew three sizes that day.