Hello, morbidly curious.

This is not my twin. I have grown a beard.

August 12, 2015

My idea of a blog reader is of someone with a keen curiosity and a great memory. Also inclined towards idleness. After all, why spend time reading stuff off a computer screen? What could one hope to discover, except humiliating truths? What are rhetorical questions? Okay.
Yesterday I met our new pharmacist, I’ll call him Dave Gillespie, a tall, quiet man. I hope he enjoys working with us folks at Omnicare pharmacy. What’s with the name “Omnicare”? Isn’t it a bit misleading? Omni means “all inclusive.” Care means, well, anxious attention to ensure the well-being of another. I guess I’m okay with the “care” part. But “Omni?” No pharmacy in our country is all inclusive! An octopus has many arms with individual suckers. And it has limits, so our pharmacy could better be called Octocare. We would make up eight kinds of care we provide. List them on our fingers, but not our thumbs.
Maybe 8 years ago, or so, I worked for a home-grown pharmacy here in Billings, Montana, that specialized in providing home intravenous infusions, such as antibiotics and hydration, and tube feedings. Its name? “At Home Solutions.” A really fine business that filled a need locally. I thought its name was appropriate and well stated. Then the owner sold her business to a bunch of investors who joined together with a larger company called, “Option Care.” This name was nowhere near as pretentious as “Omnicare,” but close. It still had the big open “O” at the beginning, ready to swallow smaller companies, which it did.
To me, the name change meant I had to answer the phone differently and use the new Option Care stationery. Soon, perhaps two years later, Option Care got swallowed by the larger, Walgreens Drug company. We got rid of the coffee cups, pens, business cards, mouse pads, and refrigerator magnets with Option Care logos. We couldn’t work up the same enthusiasm when we changed our name again.
This purchase of Option Care by Walgreens resulted in the inevitable changes in our phone answering, but with less enthusiasm. Also this time a bald guy in a necktie from California visited us and told us we needed to stop doing thus-and-such and start doing that.
Oh, we still cared for sick people exactly as we had, we just had to document it differently in a computer. I thought the changes were quite good. I didn’t mind because I had been documenting care for years. I just didn’t like the insulting way Mr. Bald Necktie spoke to us. He did, however, leave us finally, to travel over to Oregon, where he wanted to retire. He left us with some sort of fake assurance that we were fine folks. After all.
I hope Mr. Gillespie likes us at Omnicare. We’re mostly pretty nice people and good looking, mostly. Well, we do have a blonde female technician who is quitting because she wants to be a dental assistant. She was in pretty good condition until recently when she got hit in the eye by a whiffle ball. Now one of her pupils is permanently dilated. Such scars are evidence of character, I hope to tell her today. My cousin has an eye like that. He got hit by a chunk of wood. The one eye is creepy looking when she looks you in the face and one of her pupils is larger.
The other folks at Omnicare are a pleasant mix of younger and older, all of us struggling daily to keep a whole list of nursing homes and assisted living facilities stocked with medications. Wait. That’s misleading. We do little “stocking” of meds. We send the residents of these places their prescriptions, individually packaged with their names and the instructions for taking. We are good at it.
We often speak to nurses and nurses aids. I find them fun to speak with, even the ones who seem stern and refuse to be teased. I don’t tease! I simply tell them the truth. They like it. People are not used to the truth. “How are you doing?” “Terrible, my elbows are killing me!” “I’m so sleepy I can hardly work!” “Good, payday is tomorrow.” Like that. “Good, the boss took the day off and now things are rolling along really well.”