Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Too many zeroes

In a previous career, you ordered things by the PIECE. If you wanted 100 of something, whether it came in a pack of 10 or 20 or 100, you ordered 100 and everyone knew what you wanted and it was delivered accordingly.

In PHARMACY, you order by pack size.

Yeah, I learned that the hard way.

During my first month as a pharmacist, I had to place an order using a website directly linked to our supplier. I needed to order generic extra strength Vicodin. It comes in bottles of 100 and 500. I needed to order a bottle of 100 as a special order. So yeah, I put in the quantity 100.
The next day I work the late shift. I walk into the pharmacy. The pharmacy manager is on the other side of the room.  She raises a finger in a "come here" gesture and says "Mr. RxMan...  come here." She asks how I'm doing. This is instantly troubling for she never expressed any interest in how I was doing before. I said "Fine." She says, "Have you seen the back room yet?"  I walk back there to find 10 boxes of 10 bottles each of 100 count generic Vicodin ES. No one at the supplier who packed the delivery thought this was unusual. Neither did the driver. They just delivered them without asking, and here they are at my feet. Although the tech was getting a big kick out of it, the pharmacy manager was not amused.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

The husband works for the government doing purchasing (among other jobs). Sitting at his last duty station is a huge tool box (VidMar) of paper clips. Someone ordered cases instead of boxes. Yay!

Anyone need paperclips? It's not like vicodin, we can give them away.

Anonymous said...

Have you ordered Baxter sodium chloride for irrigation? Lol

Anonymous said...

dewey decimal is confusing after 14 hours!

Anonymous said...

That grumpy pharmacy manager needed to lighten up. It's a funny and honest mistake that an inexperienced person might make.

So what did you do about the mistake? Can you send Vicadin back to the supplier? I don't suppose you ran a sale on Vicadin.

--Christina

bcmigal said...

I did something similar...only I ordered $21,000 of brand name Cipro....luckily, we were able to send it back.

Anonymous said...

I ordered 24 L NS for our infusion room... meaning 2 cases of 12. We had 24 cases of liter bags... management was not amused!

Crazy RxMan said...

We were able to send it back, but only after I had to get a "talking to" from the Regional Pharmacy Manager.

Ugh.

boilerrph87 said...

Back in the days of real customer service by suppliers, we'd get a phone call to see if it was an error in ordering or we really wanted that big of an order :)

Anonymous said...

We've all been there. I remember selling to big bottles of sodium chloride, so i decide to order 2 to replace. Turns out it was 2 cases.

I would make a buy 1 get 1 free special on vicodin!