Pharmacy Etiquette

You'd think I'd know how to behave in a pharmacy, right? Apparently not. It's not like I haven't been properly schooled either; my wife is a pharmacist and my daughter has worked in one, so no problem. Except ask the very Angry Karen who I managed to hack off at the pharmacy last week.

Of course with the holidays quickly approaching, several days before Thanksgiving, my body decided to betray me. 

"Ha ha!" it railed. "You were all set to gorge yourself silly so I'm stopping you from doing that! Poof! You feel like a poo-poo platter!" (Quick juvenile sidebar: I used to enjoy ordering poo-poo platters at Chinese restaurants. Not because I liked the food; no way! I just enjoyed saying it out loud and having a little giggle. Yes, I'm six years old. But I digress...)

So, my wife takes off to enjoy being with the family, leaving me home in a pile of tissues and hacking my lungs out. Naturally, I thought I had Covid. Again. So I took a test. It was indeterminate. There were two red lines. What? There was no protocol for two red lines. 

I waited and took another test the next day. Still same strange results. Huh, I thought. Either I'm dead and in the Twilight Zone or something seems off.

Sure enough, the two tests had expired. Back to the drawing board with yet another test. This one came out as negative, but after inspecting the various packets and stuff, one of them had expired by several months. Another test was enjoyed by my nostrils and flooding eyes!

Finally, I bit the bullet and went to Urgent Care. Now the only thing I hate more than going to the doctor is going to Urgent Care. Here, you'll generally wait for hours and hours and hours in a waiting room packed with the sickest people this side of a Covid ward. But this time I had a plan. As they opened at 10:00 A.M., I decided to get there, wait it out in front of the doors like a Black Friday Walmart Raider, and get a jump on the sick masses.

I got in. And of course, first thing they wanted to do was give me a Covid test. Fun! While I should've been packing myself silly until I was sick with all sorts of high carb foods, I was having my nostrils tortured by Nurse Ratched.

So, bronchitis, bla, bla, bla. They phoned it into a nearby pharmacy (my regular one was closed on Sunday because no one is allowed to get sick on the Lord's Day.).

I gave it a good hour before I showed up. The pharmacist on duty was young and angry, clearly wanting his Sunday back, didn't speak until I did, no time for pleasantries (in fact everyone I dealt with there NEVER spoke to me first, the onus always being on me), and not once even looked up at me. "It'll be...thirty minutes," he said. While I sat down, he repeated this line numerous times to other customers, always with the well-rehearsed pause in the same place as if he was actually giving the time frame ample consideration. I mean, AS IF.

While I sat, coughing behind my mask, a long line of other drug-needing customers lined up. Sure enough after thirty minutes of drudgery (there oughta be a law against vapid non-stop Christmas music in public places this early), the eye-contact-avoiding pharmacist blipped out my name. I jumped out of my chair to go approach him. And he ignored me.

I thought, well, maybe I'm in the wrong line. So without giving it a second thought I raced over to the clerk at the pick-up line.

Using awkward hand gestures, I said, "Um, that guy over there just called my name."

The clerk is looking over my shoulder at the other waiting customers, anywhere but me. Man, what charm school did they all graduate from?

But then it hit me...did I just cut in line? Surely not. I mean, my name was called. And I'd already done my due diligence by waiting in line the first time, so my behavior is perfectly acceptable. Right? RIGHT?

By the time my bout of doubt and second doubt had fully ensnared me within its nefarious clutches, I could feel unrest at my back. Daggers, even.

I turned, mustered up an awkward smile, and said to the first person in line, "Hey, I'm sorry if I cut in line. I didn't mean to... I'd already  waited in line before and, um, he just called my name...and, um..." My hands and thumbs gesticulated in every direction, seeking out visual aid in my time of need and failing me horribly, rendering me into a drunken traffic cop.

The woman in charge of the restless natives was ballcapped, young, dressed in expensive looking designer workout clothes, and very, VERY angry. She said nothing. I kinda was expecting a small smile, maybe a handwave, a "oh, you're fine."

Instead I got the most hateful glare, slow shake of the head, and upturned sneer I've ever been accorded. She followed up with an arm-fold and a very audible snort through her inflated and enflamed nostrils. Absolutely spewing out her incredibly self-entitled rich, white yuppie anger. 

In the halls of CVS, I faced down the fury of Karen Unleashed.

I've seen how things like this can escalate on YouTube, so I hauled ass, arms full of prescriptions, out of there.

Later I asked both my wife and daughter if what I had done constituted poor pharmacy etiquette. To my relief, they both said no, since I'd already waited in line.

But try telling that to Karen, Angry Queen of CVS. Undoubtedly, it's my fault, though. Had I kept my mouth shut and not offered an apology (even though I didn't think it truly necessary, just covering the bases), then I wouldn't have fed her flames of self-righteous indignation. Akin to feeding online trolls, sometimes I just can't help myself.

Let this be a warning, friends. Beware of Karens in pharmacies. They're mad, they're there, and they want to see the manager NOW!

While I've got bad decisions on my mind, consider poor Shawn Biltmore. Stuck in a dead-end, miserable drudge of corporate nonsense job, his love-life is also going nowhere. Until he gets bitten by a werewolf. Things change. And not necessarily for the better. Yet it doesn't stop Shawn from forging ahead from one bad decision to another. Yes sir, it's corporate satire at its fiercest, funneled through the lens of a horror tale and more werewolves than you can toss a stick to. Check out the horror, suspense, and dark humor of Corporate Wolf. Tell them Karen sent you. And then demand to see the manager.

Bait and Switch at the Grocery Store

I didn't want to do it.

I never envisioned myself doing it.

But, recently, I went full-on Karen on a poor, hapless assistant manager at our neighborhood grocery store.

(Hangs head in shame.)

It really wasn't her fault either. I kinda knew that at the time, but when you're mad, you're mad. Yelling always helps. Well, not really... Or does it?

Anyway, my local big chain grocery store was running a promotion, the kind they do so often. If you're a card-carrying "Rewards" member, this entitles you to special sales, promos, gimmicks, and all kinds of crap. This week, the featured promo was if you spend $65 bucks on groceries, you'll get 65 cents off a gallon of gas. In this day of inflation with $4.00 gallons, that's what I'd consider a SCORE!

So, I start piling unwanted junk into my cart. Lessee...gotta have those bacon-wrapped jalapeno peppers, can't live without stuffed mushroom caps, french onion dip I need to sustain. You know, all the essentials. Anything to get the cart to tally up to 65 bucks.

So, the old check-out guy rings me up. When I get my receipt, I notice my 65 cent gas deduction isn't on there. I think, no problem, an oversight, I'll go directly to customer service and have it corrected, not the first time.

So the young girl grimaces and says, "Did you ask for it?"

"What?"

"Did you ask for it? You have to ask for it now."

Crickets. So many crickets. 

"I've never had to ask for it before," I say.

"I know," she says, her grimace growing. "It's a new rule that just came down from corporate. You have to ask the cashier for the discount."

My crickets slowly morphed into rockets red glaring. "It wasn't advertised! If that's not illegal, then it's highly unethical!" By this time, I'm gaining quite an excited crowd of looky-loos. Surely I'm on YouTube somewhere.

"I'm sorry, sir. It's not my rule."

"I'm not happy about this." I thought, wow, those strong words will show her.

"I know, I'm not happy about it either," she says.

"Well, can't you give me a break this once?" Like I'm pleading with a cop to let me go with a warning or something. "Can't you honor the gas discount since it wasn't advertised?"

"I wish I could," she says. "But it's the new corporate rule."

"I'm not happy about this." I keep chanting this like some kind of delusional mantra from a crazed bag lady. "I'm not happy about this." I hang my head, shaking it in disbelief. The further I travel through the store toward the exit, the angrier I'm getting. I can feel my face simmering with fireworks rage. I start yelling and cussing, Karen gone wild. "Goddammit! Had I known about this I wouldn't have bought sixty-five bucks worth of this crap! You didn't advertise it! That's illegal! Bait and switch! I'm not happy about this!!! I'm not happy about this!!!"

I'm getting louder and louder, truly looking and sounding like a schizophrenic bag lady pushing my cart by this point, yelling at no one in particular.

By the time I get to the car, I'm shaking. Ten minutes later, I'm home and feel really kinda bad about the way I treated the poor, hapless assistant manager. I've been searching for her for a month now, hoping to apologize, but haven't found her. I hope I didn't cause her to quit.

Meanwhile, the corporate office still hasn't replied to my Karentastic ranting messages. I wonder why?

While on the topic of bad behavior, there's plenty on display (of the "normal" and supernatural sort) in my darkly comic suspense thriller, horror, mystery, satire werewolf extravaganza, Corporate Wolf. Give it a look-see and learn how not to compose oneself in a corporate setting. (And how not to eat your coworkers). 

The Importance of being a Karen

Last week I was visiting my daughter for the first time in a while. As we do, our conversation inevitably swung around to politics. I told her that all of these in-your-face protestors look like steroid-chomping, bad-ass bikers with tats, shaved heads, impressive beer bellies, and beards down to their "moobs."

She said, "Really? All I see are a bunch of Karens."

"What're you talking about? What's a 'Karen?'"

"They're these bored white ladies who wanna raise hell everywhere they go. Wait...let's look it up. Google can explain it better than I can."

But I knew what a "Karen" was already, oh, yes I did. It's the kind of woman who (even though she's fit and takes Pilates) demands to see the manager of a clothing store and further demands that they start carrying a certain dress in plus sizes. Or the woman at work who wears all kinds of ribbons, buttons, and safety pins to show she stands up for doing the right thing and yells at anyone who thinks differently. Maybe it's the woman who starts a fight in the grocery store because someone's walking down the wrong way in newly sanctioned one-way aisles.

That's a "Karen." We've all known them. Or at least heard them. And...I realized I've been guilty of some Karen-like behavior in the past as well. I once outed someone publicly for not recycling a plastic bottle. Guess that makes me a "Karl."

Along with a little help from Wikipedia, my daughter found the "official" Karen definition: Karen is a pejorative term used in the Western world for a woman perceived to be entitled or demanding beyond the scope of what is considered appropriate or necessary. A common stereotype is that of a racist white woman who uses her privilege to demand her own way at the expense of others.

Okay, so maybe I'm not such a "Karen" after all. But Donald Trump is the biggest, baddest Karen of them all.

But let's not be too hard on the "Karens" of the world. They're needed, too, part of the circle of life. For you see, they balance out the "Joe-Bobs" of the world, and if you've been following the news (how can you not? We're inundated by it!), you know exactly what they're all about.

The interesting thing is all of us are getting different stories from the media. My daughter sees "Karens" screaming at cops. I see bikers. A friend of mine sees inner-city kids and he said I'm getting a different message. He's right.

It pisses me off that the media's playing us--becoming actual news-makers and influencers themselves--instead of just reporting. No matter the source, (right, left, or other wing) they all have agendas these days.

That's why my wife fled to the BBC. The Brits with their stiff upper lips don't have too much of an investment in the stupidity rolling through our lands right now (they've got their hands full with Brexit).

Whoops. Gotta run before things get ugly. A Karen's screaming at a Starbucks manager because she didn't get a double-shot.

Speaking of other things that piss me off, check out my short story collection, Twisted Tales from Tornado Alley. In addition to being frightfully scary and scarifyingly amusing, these tales were written in a post-Trump-trauma state of mind. Enjoy!