I’m exhausted, so this probably won’t read with as much impact as how the events actually unfolded…

Today has got to be one of the most fucked up days on the pharm on record. Possibly even weirder than the OxyContin bust day.

The two main highlights were the evil woman and the transgendered dude trying to pass a phony Duragesic script. Then there was the woman who was illiterate.

Evil Woman (EW) entered the pharmacy and made herself known to me first by shouting at me from halfway down the aisle. These aisles are about 150 feet long, so she was a good 75 feet away. And she was shouting. That was our first interaction. That got me mentally labeling her as Garden Variety Harmless Eccentric. (GVHE*)

After consulting with some techs about where to find the item of interest (wasn’t in my normal store), I sent the lead tech out to help her. She does so, and within 15 seconds, EW’s got her off to do some shopping for her while she gets a couple of other things. OK, that’s a little weird, but no big deal, we were in the middle of a 5 minute breather.

This woman drops a basketful of shit on the counter, and announces very loudly that she would like to return an item. No receipt, of course. I page the manager since I couldn’t be arsed to know the policies regarding returns without receipts. The manager handles the transaction personally, and she’s heckling him the entire time. Just a stream of low-impact derogatory comments, and insinuations that he’s ripping her off because she spent “much more money than that on this item” and “I spend a lot of money here and in this pharmacy so what the hell is wrong with you!” I’m starting to get a little irritated, since I don’t like people who treat others poorly. EW has now elevated herself from GVHE to RPWEI — Rude Person With Entitlement Issues.

EW starts in asking me if I can ring out her script. I tell her that no, I can’t, not until the return is complete. Anyway, the manager is soon done, and wisely, he’s kept his mouth shut the whole time. (Really there’s no better way to deal with this sort of thing, since as soon as you engage it in any way, you’re officially fuckedtrapped.)

He scoots, and she starts heckling me now about how goddammit we’re not supposed to fill any prescriptions unless she asks for them. (She had two waiting, and she was only expecting one.) Whatever. This woman is irritating but she hasn’t quite perfected the art of being rude, since I’m largely ignoring her and she’s letting me get away with it. Unrefined evil. Quasi-evil. The Diet Coke of evil, if you will.

She wanders off — finally — and someone thinks to look at her profile. Liar. She’s been coming to the pharmacy for a grand total of two weeks. Even better, in big bold letters in the comments section: “Wanted by police!!!”

Fantastic. I was just happy she was gone.

Not five minutes later, this other person walks in. I noticed her right away. She was tall with dark hair. Really tall. Didn’t think much of it until I walked over to wait on her.

Wait a second, this isn’t a woman. It’s a man, baby! A man with full D cups, makeup, mascara, and possibly a wig. And tall. I’m about 6’1, and I’m standing on a 4″ ledge, yet he’s nearly looking me in the eye. He hands me a script for Duragesic (“no substitution”), and I tell him that we probably don’t have it. He giggles and starts making out with this black dude who’s shorter than he. I go check The Book, my mind still boggling at what is transpiring in front of me.

We don’t have it, so I send them on their merry way, still trying to wrap my brain around it. (I didn’t finally settle the Male/Female debate until I handed the script back to him and saw the size and musculature of his hands.) Something stuck in my craw about the prescription, but I was so caught up in the Transgender Experience that I didn’t think about it until later. It was a fake prescription. Not a terribly good fake, but I didn’t notice because I was distracted. Clever little misdirection they’ve got going on there.

We get a PharmAlert about an hour later flagging all scripts by this particular nurse practitioner, and this was a script that she had supposedly written.

The last person of note was a new one for me. I’ve seen fake prescriptions, transgendered people — though never the two combined — other RPWEIs, and myriad other oddities. This last one made me stop dead in my tracks.

I had dealt with this woman earlier in the day, and she had tried my patience then. I was on my way out for the night, and was already five minutes late. (Five minutes is a long time when you’ve spent hours numbering in the double digits in the same little 10×20 space.) She was trying my patience yet again. Just so bloody needy. Asking trivial questions. I thought maybe she had forgotten her reading glasses at home or something. Finally she looks at me when she’s all done and says “Thank you so much for your help and not getting upset with me. I can’t read or write.”

…

Talk about feeling like an asshole. Whether she was just being nice or not, I don’t know. Nor does it matter — I still felt like a complete jerk.

I’ve never come across someone (that I know of) that can’t read or write. Not in this country, anyway. I’m going to be more careful how I deal with needy people from now on, I think.

* I tend to like GVHEs. They’re the most interesting people we deal with on a day-to-day basis.

[tags]Medicine, pharmacy, gender dysphoria, WTF[/tags]