Every good roller coaster has ups, downs, twists, turns, and occasionally, they throw you for a loop. Pharmacy, like most retail, has a lot in common with roller coasters, so today I wanted to share some of the stories I have that fit into each of the things I listed above. But don't worry, my username is a bit of a misnomer - I promise all of these stories will be happy, or at least more wholesome than the usual fare.

The Fast Start

Flu shot season can be one of the most aggravating times of year. Don't get me wrong - I love it when people choose to get the vaccine, but sometimes corporate has... unrealistic goals for us. So it was that our small corner pharmacy, one that had averaged 20 flu shots per month last year and only 40 per month in August and September, had a weekly goal of 48 flu shots for first week of October. My PIC was optimistic. Me... less so.

Monday morning, I stroll into the store 20 minutes before the pharmacy opens, and run smack into a crowd that had formed by the pharmacy window. We'd had a handful of people waiting for the pharmacy to open in the past, but we barely hit this many people in the whole store at one time - and the parking lot outside had been empty! I finally made my way through the crowd and saw my PIC, equal parts tired and frazzled, taking papers from some people and calling a few more up to the counter. She asked me to go and finish processing her list of flu shots - she'd only gotten a chance to process the first 20(!!). Over the course of the next hour, we process and deliver 60 flu shots.

It turned out that the biggest tenant in the office building next to us had recently come under new management, and management had decided that productivity had decreased markedly during the winter last year because someone brought the flu into the office, and it spread like... well, like a viral infection. So management had offered an additional $50 to the holiday bonus of any employee who got their flu shot before the middle of October.

Riding High

Every pharmacy has its regulars, and over time you get to really know them. At my store, we have one young man who used to come in three, maybe four times a month to pick up his mother's prescriptions. He rides a very loud Harley, which is perfect - it means we know he's coming before he's even walked in the store, and more than a few times we've been able to catch and finish a prescription that hadn't even been printed yet without him knowing.

It was the day before his mother's birthday, and our pharmacy team had bought and signed a card for her wishing her a good year to come, attaching it to her bag of prescriptions that her son would, inevitably, have to come in to pick up. It was a small gesture, but we try to do it for all of our regulars. I was on break when I heard the Harley rumble into the parking lot, and I decided to loiter around in the pharmacy so I could be there when the prescriptions were picked up.

I'm glad I made that decision, because instead of her son coming to pick everything up, in walks the patient herself. We didn't realize it at first, because none of us had ever seen her before, but it made giving her the prescriptions along with the birthday card that much better. She had just gotten a (relatively) clean bill of health from her doctors for the first time in years, and she and her son had gone out riding on his Harley to celebrate.

She's down to only needing to come to the pharmacy once or twice a month now, but every time she does, she takes a moment to greet everyone working by name, and she always gives us a good survey. Her son's only had to come in a few times for her since that day, but it's always nice to hear that rumble of his Harley outside, and it always brings back the warm and fuzzy feeling from that day.

What Goes Up, Must Come Down

Every week after our big shipment of drugs comes in from our chain's warehouse distributor, it falls to myself and one of my pharmacists to put everything away in the late hours of the night after the pharmacy has closed. We come prepared - a fully charged phone, a pair of headphones, and (at least for me) an iced coffee to keep me awake.

On one side of a cabinet of drugs, my pharmacist is putting away the Do-Ga prescriptions, and on the other side, I'm putting away the Ge-Je. On top of the cabinet, in that shared no-man's-land that neither of us can see over, is where we put all of our big containers. On my side, we've gotten in five containers of Golytely, and unbeknownst to me, my pharmacist has nearly a dozen containers of Gavilyte on her side. There's not quite enough space up there for all of my bottles, but I'm able to balance everything so they're just barely not falling, and I sit back down to try to organize the various Janumet and Januvia we've gotten in.

A container of Golytely falls and hits me in the shoulder. I finish putting away a handful of drug bottles, then stand and put the container back on top of the cabinet, in a different spot. I go back to what I'm doing. A minute later, another one of the containers falls. Again, finish what I'm doing, get up, make a new space, sit back down. By the time I'm finished with my wall, I've had the containers of Golytely fall a half dozen more times. One falls again, and I walk around to my pharmacist's side of the aisle with it.

Me: Hey <RPh>, I don't have enough room for this bottle on my side, it keeps falling off. Do you have any room on your side?

<RPh>: I don't have any room here, either. *points up to the precariously situated bottles of Gavilyte* These keep falling too.

It took us longer than it probably should have to realize what was happening. Every time I put my last bottle up, it shifted my pharmacist's bottles just enough to make one fall. Then a couple minutes later, she'd put her bottle up in a different spot and make another one of mine fall. The next day we got a chance to watch the security footage, and realized this had gone on for nearly thirty minutes before we finally figured it out.

I still have the footage from that night on my phone, and it's still funny every time I watch it.

The Surprise Twist

One of the techs that used to work at our store, let's call him Bryan, had a bit of a penchant for pranks. He worked weekends, and was generally the only tech with the pharmacist for the last few hours of Sunday. If you worked Monday, you were sure to be the subject of one of his pranks - anything from changing inkwell in a pen from black to pink, to taping all of the amber vials together so when you pulled one out you'd end up taking 2, 5, or 15 others with you.

But his final prank was easily his masterpiece - and one we're still getting caught by to this day.

You see, Bryan was very much into making things. And for his magnum opus, Bryan had decided to remake a classic prank - the snake in a can. He made them of all different size springs, put them in various open bottles (some of them completely empty, others nearly full), and put them back in their places on the shelves before saying his goodbyes to us. To date we have found more than 20 of these snakes, most of them in the first week after he left... last year.

The most recent one? Found it yesterday. Who knows how many more are on the shelf, just waiting to surprise us.

The Turn to the Bizarre

The pharmacy I work in is... well, cramped would be the best word to describe it. It's certainly less spacious than most of the other pharmacies in our chain, and so we've had to get creative with where we keep things to make more room. A couple months ago, one of the metal shelves where we put the wire baskets of waiting prescriptions broke, and while we waited for our service ticket for a repair to get answered, we had to find somewhere else to put those displaced prescriptions.

Cue the following week ("Urgent" service ticket my ass) when a tech from another store is covering a shift with me and working pickup. We'll call him Raj, since he had a spot-on impersonation of the character of the same name from The Big Bang Theory. Things were running smoothly, until...

Raj: Hey, _Depression? Where do you put your pee?

*record scratch*

Me: Where do I what now?

Raj: *holds up a prescription bag from the unsorted waiting bin, with a last name starting with "P"*

Me: Oh! That is not what I thought you meant by that question.

Raj laughed. I laughed. My pharmacist continued to question why she hired me.

Stuck in a Loop

I fully appreciate that patients don't understand all of the nuance that goes on with filling, billing, and tilling their prescriptions. But sometimes, no matter how you try to explain something, they just don't get it. If that happens, you might find yourself in a feedback loop, where you and the patient become a modern day version of an Abbott and Costello sketch. Such was the case between a patient, who we'll call Abbott, and a tech (you can guess which name I'll use).

Costello: Unfortunately, Mr. Abbott, it looks like your prescription isn't being covered by your insurance. The cost with a discount card comes to $28.

Abbott: What do you mean, the prescription isn't covered? *picks up the bag on the counter with his prescription inside* Is this not my prescription?

Costello: That is your prescription, but it isn't covered by your insurance. We can't bill it through them, but we were able to use a discount card instead.

Abbott: But if my insurance wouldn't cover it, how could you fill it?

Costello: We don't need the insurance to cover it, but some prescriptions are so prohibitively expensive without it that we call to ask first. In this case-

Abbott: So it's being covered then?

Costello: ...By a discount card, yes. Not your insurance.

Abbott: So this isn't my prescription then? If it's not covered by my insurance?

Costello: No, sir, this is your prescription. We can still fill it even if your insurance won't cover it.

Abbott: But if you can fill it, that means my insurance covers it!

Costello: No, sir, we can fill it regardless. As long as the doctor writes the prescription, we can-

Abbott: The doctor wrote a prescription for it, but the insurance won't cover it?

Costello: Yes, sir.

Abbott: Then that means it can't be filled!

Costello: ...Would you like to hold off on picking this up then? We can reach out to your doctor and ask if they want to prescribe any alternatives instead.

Abbott: No, I'll take it. I'm just confused how you can fill it without the insurance.

And that's the abridged version of how that conversation went.