Stupid Walgreens

Pill Minder

I take a handful of pills every day to combat being old. I have a couple of pill minders I fill up once a week to make it easy to take the right pills the other six days. Yesterday I ran out of one drug, so I ordered a refill from Walgreens. It should show up in the mail in a week or two. It showed up yesterday afternoon. If the package had been from Amazon, I wouldn't have been too surprised, but Walgreens has never been this fast. Their website, which normally does a good job of keeping track of which drugs I am likely to need and can be ordered, must have slipped a cog. Oh, look, it's not Walgreens anymore, they've farmed out their web services to something called AllicanceRx.

You would think a big company like Walgreens would do a better job of ensuring their web service was working properly before they turned it loose on the world. Not only does it not keep track of orders properly, it can't even remember my logon and password. Even my bank does that. It might be incompetence on the part of the programmers, or if I put on my mud tinted glasses, it might be someone's stupid idea to keep people from stealing opioids using grandma's prescription.

And what's the deal with requiring the pharmacist to 'release' drugs? I go to the drive through to pick up drugs for my wife and the pharmacist wants to tell me things about these drugs. I don't want to know, I'm just the courier. Presumably the patient discussed this with their doctor. All this information is written out in the papers that accompany these drugs. There is no reason to waste the pharmacist's time with this kind of nonsense. Except, some people are (1) unable to read and (2) can't remember what happened two hours ago, but they are still allowed out in public.

I suspect the real reason for having the pharmacist 'release' the drugs is public relations. Some people want to talk to the pharmacist, not just some clerk. I admit talking to the clerks is a little annoying, they operate from a script that requires both of us to recite the correct phrases in order for them to hand over my gift from the gods. The pharmacists are a little more free, and some of them are interesting characters. Immigrants, mostly, from obscure places.

I will admit that the papers that come with the drugs are like just about every pamphlet included with every other product on the planet. They do include two or three lines of useful information, but those few lines are buried in twenty pages of useless bullshit. Yes, I know, we need lawyers to mediate disputes, otherwise this country would be like Syria, but do we really need to have all this legal crap intruding on our otherwise peaceful existence? Can't they keep it confined to the courtroom?

P.S. Blogger's spellcheck doesn't recognize opioids.