Hi, ya, it’s me, okay, well. I do have the last part of grievances saved in my drafts because I still haven’t finished it. It takes a lot of stamina to go back  to that mental place that I was in, so I apologize. However, given the current covid pandemic and the fact that I am essentially in quarantine until my new job starts, that might be coming out soon! However, I would like to prioritize my novels, given that I actually anticipate something coming from those some day. But let me get to the current state of the union.

Back in June of 2019, my contract at the health department ended and I was not rehired. I will likely address that in a future post, but I mention this now only to illustrate why I was unemployed from July to November. I was applying to several jobs throughout that time, with very few getting back to me. I did get at least one or two interviews, but heard nothing afterward, which was very discouraging. Finally, my mom heard through the grapevine that supposedly our pharmacy was hiring; all I pretty much needed to do was call and ask for the manager and he would set up an interview (purely out of formality) right then and there. I was really hoping for a better paid position, as I had been making $21 per hour at the health department, but the fact was I was unemployed and understimulated. I reasoned with myself that working at a pharmacy should at least be somewhat dignified as it was somewhat related to my field of study, so I went ahead and called to set up the interview. I printed out my resume, dolled myself up, dressed professionally and headed over to the pharmacy. The manager didn’t ask many questions; he mainly just summarized the work I would be doing and then told me what my wage would be, which was less than half what I made at the health department and would be still even less than I made while working at the student center, even after the raise. But I didn’t have any other options; I was forced to accept.

It was a full two days after I had the interview before John finally called me back. My mother was deeply concerned because he had told the other girl who had interviewed that day (she called to schedule after I called, but scheduled her interview sooner) was told she would start the very next day. I can only assume that John didn’t want to train two techs at the same time, so he spaced us out by a week. Looking back, I wish I would have tried to reach out to her and ask what her experience was, if only to prepare myself for what was coming.

At Riverview Pharmacy, their motto is “Let our family take care of your family” or something along those lines. Yes, I would say that at least 97% of the customers at the pharmacy received great service in comparison to the other pharmacies in the area, but internally… let’s just say if we are to consider the employees to be a family (though some literally were), they are a dysfunctional family at best. I don’t perfectly remember my first week, but I quickly learned quite a few things about this pharmacy, not only about the actual work, but about how the employees conducted themselves. I would say, especially about how they conducted themselves. There were two which were most glaringly obvious, which if anyone who work(s/ed) there happened to read this or if someone who reads this ends up working there will be able to point out immediately: Mo and Ellen. I do see the irony of this being a second person with such a name to have a presence in a story on this blog… not to detract, but if I find one more worthy of a rant then that will be a name to add to my caution list, right under anyone named Brooke. Anyway. Let’s start with Ellen, because she was not great but she was not nearly as bad as Mo. Ellen is the part time pharmacist at the pharmacy. She’s an old cat lady; there’s no two ways about that. I think that might be why she is the way she is: all she has apart from the pharmacy, really, are her cats. I think she has four of them. When we started wearing masks due to corona, she had a cat face printed one. Being a cat lady is not what makes her bad, though. That could make her endearing, if it weren’t for the fact that she “plays both sides” as it was described by one of the other pharmacists. What he meant by this is that she can be very two-faced and hypocritical; constantly being critical of everyone’s work (except for the manager- she is HIGHLY comparable to Dwight Schrute in that way), but then making many more mistakes than she ought to have been for such a seasoned pharmacist, which she would also regularly brag about. She was very self-righteous and had a superiority complex. I only remember her owning up to any of her mistakes on one occasion, and she was off the clock at that time, visiting the pharmacy on her day off (I know.). Otherwise, because of the way pharmacies operate, she would always very conveniently place all of the blame for any mistakes which were partially on her on the other party, most often a tech, and most of us were pretty new to the entire industry. She would play herself off as someone very saintly and considerate, but I think she was trying to get an ego boost from making herself superior to everyone except for the manager, whom she idolized. Unfortunately, this unrelenting insistence that she was always right would cause a lot of friction because she was most certainly not always right, sometimes to the point of interfering with a good deal someone’s work, which they would have to redo. I have seen her on a least a couple of occasions get into spats with the front end certified tech because she essentially treated her like she was stupid and had no idea what she was doing despite the fact that she is very knowledgeable and has worked there for several years. After a particularly bad screaming match, Ellen was venting to the people in the breakroom, which was unfortunately where my purse and coat were, so when I got back there she attempted to vent to me. I heard the fight, but I was not there for it, so I told her that I didn’t want to dwell on it, but that must not have been a good enough hint that I did not want to be associated with that drama in any way because Ellen continued on.

However, in the grand scheme of things, I could have dealt with Ellen and had no issues at the pharmacy had it not been for one other person: Mo. Yikes. When I started at the pharmacy she had a boyfriend, but they broke up during my time there, and let’s just say that although I had never seen him at all let alone the two of them together, seeing the way she is around us made that breakup unsurprising. Now, I am certainly no therapist, but if I needed to quickly double my net worth I’d bet a great deal of money that she has, to some extent, some undiagnosed bipolar. My skin has been horrendous since I started working there, and I think I was getting stress acne almost exclusively from her. I am 24 and I felt like I was being micromanaged by someone who was younger than me. She was constantly looking over my shoulder and criticizing the way I worked despite the fact that I had just started and nobody had given me any training. In fact, she was meant to be giving me training, but it seems that her idea of doing so was to cut me loose and then yell at me when I inevitably got it wrong. She gave me some of the worst anxiety that I have ever experienced in my life, and furthermore she did so with no regard to how anyone felt about the way she went about things. Because this is so fresh and recent, I can give several pointed examples. Near the end of my time at the pharmacy, there was an instance in which Dee, Mo’s mother and the certified tech in charge of everything pertaining to the back room, was swamped and could not take a phone call, so being as I was up front that day and therefore manning the phones, I took the call. This person (I can’t remember who it was and therefore can’t commit a HIPAA violation) was trying to order some test strips and lancets because they had run out. This is typical; I could take care of this. I went to their profile in our system and saw they were out of refills, and when I went to send an electronic refill request I saw that Dee had already sent one the day before. Now, doctors often take a few days to respond to these, but regardless I asked the pharmacist in charge (who is almost always up front) what, if anything, I ought to do. He SUGGESTED that I print out a hard copy of the refill request and fax it over. I want to make it clear that this was not an order, but a suggestion, and furthermore I did not know how to do this and we still had our own work to do up front. So I decided to make a note of this and put it on Dee’s desk because I knew that by the time I would be able to crank that out, she would be back at her computer and be able to do it herself, if that’s what she thought was best, but seeing as it was her patient and she was the one who knew everything about their situation it would be best to leave it to her, especially considering that she had already sent an electronic request. I told this to John and he agreed, but unfortunately Mo was lurking in the aisles and decided that, despite the fact that she challenges John’s authority frequently and will readily argue with him despite the fact she is not even a college graduate yet, I had no right to refuse a command from him (which is not what I did) and came up to scold me about it, interrupting her own work to do so. This, however, was all for nothing, because when I asked Dee about it later she said she had already called and taken care of it! Essentially, even if I had done what John had suggested, I probably still would have gotten chewed out by Mo for stepping on Dee’s toes! That’s how she is! To be honest, I really love Dee; she is very motherly and caring and kind. I don’t know how her children ended up the way Courtney and Mo did. But that’s just one incident with Mo.

One incident that made me the angriest was a day probably within my first two or three weeks working at the pharmacy. That day was hectic; there was a long line of people waiting to get their medicine and I was the only person at the checkout counter. They were supposed to get completely new, modern system at the pharmacy at the beginning of April this year (2020), though because of the whole coronavirus thing that has gotten pushed back to who knows when. So what system were we using while I worked there? Practically everything is manual. The labels print out with barcodes, but we never use them because we don’t have a barcode scanner; everything has to be input manually, which is time consuming, and is not helped when there is a long line of customers. Furthermore, you quickly run out of bills and coins in the cash drawer. There is a little metal box that sits on one of the medicine shelves where we keep filled prescriptions awaiting pickup, but aside from that nobody had yet told me as of that point where you were meant to get more money. And that day, I ran out of pennies. Frantic, I asked the closest non-busy person where the pennies are: that person happened to be Mo, who was waiting for counterspace to fill some prescriptions of narcotics that she had from the back room. Any prayers or hopes that I had that she would respond reasonably must have fallen on deaf ears, because rather than helping me or at the very least telling me where to find the pennies, she instead yells (in front of the patrons, I might add), “Why are you asking ME??????”, indignant that I would ask her, the person meant to be in the back room, what to do rather than asking the other three techs who were swamped with work. I want to again clarify that Mo is the tech who has been there the longest and who, at the time, was NOT busy, as she was waiting on the other techs to give her space to fulfill her last task. Flustered and borderline panicked, I tried to figure out what I should do in order to ring out the woman at the counter, who was waiting for the remainder of her change which I could not provide. Mo eventually did show me where the pennies are, but by the time I got back to the counter the woman was tired of waiting and said it was fine and she didn’t mind losing a few pennies. I think it was the next customer that told me to take a breath and calm down, as I imagine I probably looked as I felt: like I was barely holding it together. Indeed, that is the only time in my entire professional career that I had been on the verge of tears because of something at work. I am normally very good at keeping my composure, but Mo had a way of blowing past people’s boundaries, both personal and professional, as though she had a right to treat people as badly as her little heart desired.