So my foray into the depths of awesome customer service continued yesterday when I went to pick up my medicine. I was prescribed what’s commonly known as a ‘Z pack’. It’s a 5 day antibiotic in a pre-measured pack with 6 (or more) tablets. If I say that it takes 1 minute to fill that kind of order, I’m overstating.

I drop it off at CVS and tell them I’m going to wait. After 20 minutes, the guy behind the counters mumbles someone’s name and I think it’s me. So I go up and give him my name and says he called someone else. I ask him to check on my order and he takes my info, pulls a few bags and says ‘They must be still working on it’.

Another 25 minutes pass. I go back up and ask again. Now I’m getting really steamed. I see him look around at the packages and then nonchalantly moves my order from a black bin to a yellow bin. He comes back to me and says ‘They’re still working on it, they have to verify the order. It’s going to be another 5 or 10 minutes’. They used that same ‘verify’ excuse to the last 4 people who asked about their orders as well. When I was sitting in the lobby hearing them say it to other people, I believed it to be true. Now, though, I had a different thought.

Me: Did I just see you move it from the black bin to the yellow bin? Does that mean it wasn’t put in as a ’customer waiting’  order

Idiot: Um (sheepishly), yeah. it was put through as a standard order.

Me: That’s ridiculous. How come you didn’t notice that 25 minutes ago the first time that I checked. It’s only a Z-pack! It doesn’t take that long to fill (notices Pharmacist looking up).

Idiot: We’ll call you when it’s ready.

They had the order filled for me in 4 minutes.

Current Mood:  aggravated

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What happened to the days of good service? I thought it was just restaurants and gas stations that have lost good customer service, but today I found out that it hit my doctor’s office as well.

I get a chest infection several times a year – usually at the change of seasons. It’s happened to me for over 25 years and I’m well aware of the symptoms and how to fix it. My last doctor got to the point where I could call in, say I had a chest infection, and he would call in a prescription for me. It was understood that if I didn’t have any of the normal symptoms that I would need to see him.

Now, that’s not actually the problem. Even though my co-pay has recently gone up to $30/visit, I guess I can kinda understand why this one won’t call it in without seeing me. What’s got me a bit upset is that they won’t call in the script for me.

First they gave me some bullshit about it already being written and therefore they couldn’t call it in. To which my answer was, I could understand if I already left the office and you didn’t want another one floating around, but I have the physical prescription right here. You can tear it up and call it in. Instead, I get the ‘We don’t call them in anymore so we don’t get stuck waiting on the phone’. So who’s fault is that? The pharmacy for not answering the call in a timely manner (yeah customer service again.).

So instead, I have to wait until the end of the day to drop it off, and then wait around for them to fill it as well. At 6 o’clock at night, I’d much rather be at home eating tacos and playing with my kids than sitting in a CVS lobby waiting for my antibiotics.

I dunno, it just kinda really rubs me the wrong way.

Current Mood:  shocked

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I received an out of the blue email message the other day from my old friend Sara. Sara and I were friends back in high school. We were in drama together and hung together outside of school as well. We haven’t seen each other in over 10 years, though we did communicate via email for a bit. That’s even fallen off, and I haven’t heard from her in over two years, since she told me she was getting married and I told her we were pregnant with twins!

So imagine my surprise when she send me an email the other day. Apparently, she was going through her old email archives and realized that she never replied to me two years ago, so she finally did. Not only that, but she’s been in touch with a least one other friend, Heather, regularly. She proposed that we get together a sort of mini-reunion this summer and we’re currently working out the details.

While the ‘old gang’ didn’t all talk to each other directly, each of us, in turn, has been close with a least one other member. So it wasn’t too difficult to get everyone’s email addresses, and start a little mailing. Kinda bizzaro to suddenly be exchanging email with folks you haven’t talked to in so many years, while at the same time, it’s kinda cool to suddenly be talking with them again. So let’s see if Sara, Heather, Kevin, Ray, Jason and I can actually pull this off. Meeting husbands, wives, kids… Old friends, new families… new friends…

Current Mood:  sick

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This is a going to be both a normal post and a test. As for test, I am looking at a new blog writing tool from Microsoft called ‘Windows Live Writer’. It’s currently in beta, but is part of Microsoft’s push for new web based services. If you aren’t using a blog writer to post to your blog and are still struggling with editing/writing posts directly through your blog interface, you should look into a dedicated application.

What’s interesting about this application is allows you to write using the CSS layout from your blog, so you get a bit of a preview on exactly how it’s going to look. You can turn that off and see a simple B&W editor, but the WYSIWYG interface is kinda cool. Granted, my WordPress layout is a little complicated, so it doesn’t look exactly the same — but I’m getting the colors and links and stuff.

It also supports plugins, so people will be able to extend it’s functionality in the future. The first one I added was my ‘Listening To’ detector, so that I can make sure I still get to use that.

I’m interested to see how well it works. I should add my LJ account directly and see how it interfaces there as well. I don’t post directly, I send items as drafts to my blog and then publish them from there. That’s so that I can get the LJ crossposter to work.

Ok, so now for the story ~~ about the mulch. So I’m coming home from work yesterday with 3 bags of mulch in the back of my car (ownedbytwins). As I’m coming off the Deptford exit, some bitch decides that the rules of the road, and especially the big No Left Turn sign from the Wendy’s onto 41 doesn’t apply to her. She looks right, sees the lady in the turn lane and decides to go across two lanes of traffic and a double yellow line — right in front of me.

I have to slam on the breaks (doing about 50 now coming off of the exit merge) so hard that I stall the car. One of the bags of mulch flies from the back of my car hits me in the head and lands on the front passenger floor. Luckily only a small corner of the bag hit me. It weighed 30 or 40 pounds (wet mulch), and had it hit me directly would have done alot more damage. As it is, I had a headache most of the night.

I just sat there, stunned for about 15-20 seconds. Remember my friendly uvula? Well after the near miss, it was agitated again. I think I gulped really hard or had the wind knocked out of me for a sec or something. But I had that scratchy feeling and could feel it at the back of my throat.. Nice and red in the mirror too. Luckily it never got any worse, and settled in before going to bed.

Alrighty.. let’s see how this thing posts.. if it works well, I’ll let you know in the next entry, and may even possibly suggest it for others.

Current Mood:  apathetic

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