The Passive Aggressive Manager

It's the overlap hour.

I'm at the end of my shift. The pharmacy manager is here and we're both working with the technicians to get caught up a little before I leave for the day.

Oh, here comes one of our regular buttheads. He's a butthead because he never, ever calls his prescriptions in ahead of time. His favorite thing to do is just appear at the pharmacy, usually on a Monday, with empty bottles in hand.

We've tried to introduce him to the world of automatic refill. That doesn't work with Mr. Butthead because he's not adherent to his medication therapy. Sometimes he'll go 35 days on a 30 day supply. Other times it is 45 days. When we had him on automatic refill and he would come by, he would get angry that we had refilled his medication since he wasn't out of it. You know, blood pressure medication is as needed, right?

Today Mr. Butthead hands the pharmacy manager an empty bottle. My manager tells him it will be ten minutes. That's nice, but we really need twenty minutes today. We're backed up.

Mr. Butthead looks at Mickey. "I'll be back in two minutes."

Two minutes? Really? Now if it were me, I would have said something about how that's not possible, other people are waiting, we'll work fast but it will still be awhile... etc. etc.

But Mickey just ignored him.

Now I know the manager pretty well. He's all on top of stuff to get things done, especially if the patient happens to be age 21-32, blonde, and fit. But not for Mr. Butthead. Instead of processing the prescription and printing a label, he just sits the empty bottle on the counter next to the keyboard. I go back to what I'm working on which is a pile of C-II scripts dropped off 30 minutes ago.

Two minutes later, there's Mr. Butthead at the counter. Mickey ignores him. After all, Mickey told him ten minutes and I guess he's going to stick to it. Now I could have stepped in at any moment and taken over, Mickey made contact with the patient and whatever he's up to, I'm not going to get into the middle of it.

At about the eight minute mark, Mickey puts in the Rx number, prints a label, and a tech fills it. He checked it and it was ready to go in ten minutes, just as he said. Mr. Butthead stood at the counter waiting eight minutes. It's a game of chess, and Mickey took ten minutes, just as he said. 

Checkmate.