Ha!

Yes, yes, yes.

I'd worked in retail for over ten years. I got up to assistant manager before I stepped back to pharmacy and became a Certified Senior Pharmacy Tech.

There are so many horrible stories that come with that job. People have absolutely no idea how their medicine comes to be ready, how many hoops we have to jump through with their doctors office, the law, the stores policies, insurance policies, and then to have people just scoff and tell you to "just slap a label on it". Like...

I'm now in hospital pharmacy and the grass is not greener. You've just replaced 'customers' with 'nurses' and go through the same dang thing day after day. At my hospital at least, most nurses consider you to be very far beneath them but most of your conversations go quite like "I never got my medicine." "It's in your fridge." "No. It's not." "I promise you, I put it there. On the bottom shelf." "Oh. You put it in the fridge?" "Yes." "Oh. I didn't look there." And you just get irate but you're not allowed to express it. It's no wonder people have such poor mental health when we're all told that the workplace is a place that we must be polite, be professional, and absolutely cannot defend ourselves, and that if a customer becomes verbally/emotionally/mentally abusive - you cannot do anything to stop that other than call a manager. And hope they come.

I had a repeat customer who was always a BIG problem and certain people in our store would bend to his demands. So he would demand more and when we didn't know his previous leniences, he'd get angry. I was still fairly new and we had a new pharmacist that was helping out and this customer had created quite a scene already. I was shaking, choking back tears, he's still screaming, my pharmacist was on the phone with a doctor we'd been trying to get ahold of for hours, my other coworker's dealing with drive and the growing line behind him - which several of those very same customers had tried to shame/yell back/get him to stop, management isn't responding to our pages for help so when he started slamming things around and throwing them at me, my pharmacist (who is one of the most laid back soft spoken people I've worked with) went 'gotta call you back' slams the phone down and gets between me and him, sends me to the back and yells back. He refuses to fill any of the customer's meds, ring him up for anything, and tells him he'd be quite happy to transfer any of his meds to any other pharmacy of his choosing, but he will not let his team be attacked like that.

Naturally, he got chastised because you can't yell at customers (or refuse service since service = money) but nobody chastised themselves for not showing up when we called. -_- It's a wonderful system.

On a completely different note, it's amazing how much common sense people don't have regardless of their jobs/ages/lifestyles. I worked in very rich areas and very poor areas and it was exactly the same across the spectrum.

I hear you. And I admire what you do. It's a shame you can only take so much before you have to leave regardless of how much you've put into it.

You (and your job are very important). It's a thing I wish I heard more.