That didn't last long

I thought I wouldn't get worn out from work until at least Wednesday, but I was wrong. Today was the day from hell.

I walked in the pharmacy to find a disaster. One of our computers wasn't working. My manager was on the phone with the pharmacist who worked the weekend for nearly 30 minutes listening to her bitch about how the weekend crew talked shit about everyone. Our lead tech called out for some reason. I'm still not really sure why. I know she wasn't sick. Our other tech was so thrown off by our new fax machine that she could barely get any work done. There were a million calls to make from the weekend. Everyone picking up a prescription had some sort of problem. It just fucking sucked.

Of course, the shitty day and our stupid computer system contributed to me making a mistake today. No, I didn't fill a prescription wrong. Instead, I basically accused someone of trying to get an early Klonopin refill when in reality they were perfectly on time.

It was a comedy of errors that caused my mistaken accusation. The patient had transferred 4 or 5 prescriptions to another pharmacy because they were offering a coupon promotion for transferred prescriptions. This person is one of those coupon chasers. All his prescriptions had been transferred into us from another pharmacy, were filled once, then he asked us to transfer them to an entirely different pharmacy. The only problem is that federal law only allows a precription for a controlled drug to be transferred once. The new pharmacy took wouldn't fill the script for him. However, whoever had been on the phone from our pharmacy decided to mark that the Klonopin was transferred out anyway.

When a prescription is marked as transferred out, it voids the prescription number. Therefore, when he came back to have us fill it instead, our prescription number was voided. For whatever reason, all this wasn't taken care of over the weekend, and I was left with a transfer sheet to try to sort out the mess. Our transfer sheets have (supposedly) the refill history of the script being transferred. According to that sheet's refill history, this patient got his Klonpin 2/20, 2/23, 2/24, and 2/28all at different stores in our chain. It looked like a pretty clear-cut case of a patient paying cash in order to get early refills. Therefore, when I called the patient to inform him that I would not fill it, he got mad and tried to explain the transfer situation. Feeling agitated from the hellish day, I told him that he shouldn't need a refill anyway because he should have quite a stock pile from all his early refills. I wasn't very pleasant.

Immediately, he said it was impossible because he never used any other pharmacy in our chain except ours. This is when I double checked that transfer sheet and found out that the fill dates and RX numbers listed from all the other stores in our chain did not even come close to matching this guy's Klonopin. I was totally wrong and felt like a complete jackass.

I immediately apologized to him and did what I had to do in order to fix the situation, which was to fill RX with the refills that his doctor originally intended before it was mistakenly transferred out. He obviously wasn't very happy with me for basically accusing him of being a druggie. What else could I do though? I made a mistake. I could only apologize and do what I had to do to reconcile things. I even made sure to apologize to him in person when he came to pick up his Klonopin. I explained that it isn't at all like me to act that way towards a customer, and I didn't want him to get a poor first impression of me because of it. I told him I felt really terrible about it. I didn't make excuses (even if that stupid computer print-out was 90% of the reason I said it in the first place). I just sincerely apologized.

He accepted my apology and shook my hand. However, it doesn't make me feel any better about the situation. It's quite bad to make an accusation like that and be entirely wrong. Considering I don't get a chance to see this customer very often (due to the fact that he bounces from pharmacy to pharmacy chasing coupons), I'll probably never get a chance to prove that it was just a stupid mistake. I'm glad I handled the situation with integrity and owned up to my mistake, but I'm still mad at myself for it. It shouldn't have happened in the first place.

Anyway... Right now, I'm exhausted from my long and frustrating day. I have to be there bright and early tomorrow to open the store, which is good and bad. When I open the store, I feel like the day goes more smoothly, but the trade off is being really tired by the afternoon from getting up so early.

I need a vacation.