World's Worst Pharmacy

(and don't try and argue with me on that one, I really do go to The Worst.)

OK, bad enough that I'd already left the house an hour early (damn you, Daylight Savings Time! This has nothing to do with the fact that I was too lazy to change my bedroom clock last weekend!). Bad enough that I mysteriously lost my mad parallel-parking skills -- on Nassau Street, no less, where parking spots fit an SUV and a half. Bad enough that my Weight Watchers meeting was cancelled (so much for fasting on a Saturday night). Bad enough all that went down by 9:30 on a Sunday morning. I knew I shoulda just stayed in bed.

Almost home, I think, y'know this isn't too bad, I should stop at the pharmacy --- I'd forgotten to pick up a prescription the day before.

Now what can I tell you about My Pharmacy? Hmm... I remember it all well, because my tales of woe always flash before me as I pull into their parking lot. And none of it's pleasant. The fact they can't handle address and phone changes, that they always seem to lose my prescriptions, that they always seem to serve other customers who happen to have more time-consuming issues than I do and they happened to arrive just seconds before me and now I'm trapped in line behind them. You think I exaggerate? I do not, I swear it. I have watched many minutes of my life tick away while standing around in My Pharmacy.

Today? They couldn't find my prescription. Seriously. Not in the out bins (which never seem to be alphabetized, mind you. In that case, why BOTHER with them?!). Not in their computer. And no sign of my prescription anywhere. Sure as heck makes me glad I'd bother to drop it off 24 hours before, and go over, letter by letter, the spelling of my name and my address (which they will, invariably, get wrong. Again.) All that effort, and some moron lost the piece of paper.

Without a trace.

I tell the pharmacist on duty, "Look. I don't need this right away, so could you call my doctor in the morning and have her order it?"

Pharmacist on duty gives me a look of grateful relief. I smile cheerfully, despite having waited 15 minutes looking at mascara. After all, it's not her fault. And after all, quite frankly, I expected it. I mean, they didn't earn my marks as World Worst Pharmacy by being good or anything.

In 2004, I had a wisdom tooth pulled by Dr. Pith Helmet & Pick Axe, after he'd reassured me the year before that he was done excavating my mouth. He gave me a script for a fancy narcotic drug that you need DEA #'s to dispense (I felt very Paris Hilton), and I drove the 45 minutes from dentist to World's Worst Pharmacy, not aware that that anesthetic was just... about... to wear... off.........

I returned for the pick up an hour later, prompt. Actually it was 52 minutes. And after doing the whole looking-through-every-not-alphabetized-bin thing, finally looked it up on the computer and said, "Oh, well we tried to call you. Your doctor put the wrong date, it's for tomorrow, so we can't fill it." I'm holding my cell phone in my hand, "What number?" Sure enough, it's my cell phone number. From 2001. Which I'd told them three other times already.

He then asks me: "So, can you get a new script?"

OK. I'm standing in a pharmacy, with my cheek puffed out and full of cotton, holding a prescription for a dentist 45 minutes away, and they're asking me to get a new prescription?? Do I look like I want to go get a new script????

"CAN YOU CALL THEM PLEASE?! THIS IS AN EMERGENCY."

Actually it sounded more like:

"CUN YOU CULL THUM FLEAS? VISH ISH UN UMMUR JUNSHEE!" (It was a lot of cotton.)

World's Worst Pharmacy: By the numbers

Since 2004:

Number of times I've had them correct/update/re-enter my contact info: 6

Number of times I've actually had changes on my contact info: 0

Since ... EVER:

Number of times they've actually gotten an order right without controversy: 5

Number of minutes on average I have to wait in line behind one other customer: 8

Number of times I've actually walked in there, gotten my prescription, paid for it, exited in under 4 minutes: 1

(TOTAL FLUKE, I'm sure)

Sometimes I like to think that my insurance company, who've been on this crusade to get us to use their mail order pharmacy, are in cahoots with World's Worst Pharmacy to get us to HATE the whole experience of actually walking into your neighborhood pharmacy, and be forced into submission simply from the anguish of it all. Maybe the postal service is in on it too.

Frankly, it's working.

Oh, I hope to God that's what's actually going on, a massive corporate conspiracy.

Because I'd hate to think that one single local pharmacy could be consistently populated by that many morons.