Waiting outside on the footpath, it’s cold!
I check the sign on the window, which tells me the chemist opens at 8:30am, just like it said on the internet. The door should be open, but it’s not.
They’ve got the lights on down the counter end of the store and there are three, or maybe four, of them standing together having a chat.
Damn I would have worn something warmer if I knew I’d be hanging about, but I hadn’t been planning on it. I’d dropped the youngest at school and as I was going back that way thought I’d stop and pick up a prescription, and a repeat for a family member.
Going to be a cracking day once that sun gets up a bit higher, but damn it’s brisk now. A happy looking man comes out of the bakery down the road dressed for an attempt on the Pole. He has a woollen hat, a scarf, and I’m pretty sure he is rocking some PJs peaking out from the bottom of his trouser legs. In his arms he’s clutching a warm bag of baked goodness, I assume for his family. He looks very pleased.
Is it too early for a pie I wonder? On the one hand it’s 8:30 in the morning, on the other hand I got up about five hours ago so technically it’s lunchtime.
Through the window the staff in the chemist are continuing with their chat, one of them is looking right at me waiting, outside of what should be an open shop. I try to give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe it’s not a chat, maybe they’re having a meeting to kick off the day.
What would they talk about I wonder? Let’s all try and sell that left over sun screen now the sky is blue, it’s nearly expired? Probably not, does sunscreen even expire? Maybe they’re saying look out for that guy waiting outside the shop, he looks a bit dodgy, probably a shoplifter.
Eventually, by which I mean a few minutes later, an older lady comes to unlock the door. She removes that most Kiwi of inventions, the long wooden baton that you put at the bottom of a sliding door to prevent it opening. This one is multi-purpose and she then uses it to push the door release mechanism, which is out of her reach being that she is quite short and it is high up. The door slides open.
I’m first to the counter, there are no other customers. After the lady finishes opening up, putting signs out, etc. she comes and stands behind the counter, as if she’s only just noticed there is a customer. I think I should give her a name rather than keep referring to her as “the lady”.
She probably had a name badge on but I always think it’s a bit odd addressing someone you’ve just met by their first name, as if you know each other. As I’m writing this I’m think how ridiculously old fashioned that is, but old habits and all that. In any case hence forth the lady in the Chemist shall be referred to as Mary.
I explain to Mary that I’m after the two scripts and give her the names for them, spelling the surname out as always. She seems to be having problems with the computer, she’s pressing quite a few keys but nothing seems to be happening. She looks in the direction of the main chemist, I assume in the hope that he might read her mind and pop over and fix it for her.
He doesn’t. He’s laughing with a colleague and pouring a fluid from a large bottle into a smaller container. I’ve always though a Chemist an odd profession, and surely one that could be done easily by AI. You wonder about the sort of person that wants to be one, as you would a dentist. Someone that was quite interested in medicine and health, but not enough to become a doctor and help people directly. Preferring a back office function of, so afar as I can tell, mainly pouring pills from larger containers into smaller ones.
Eventually one of the other chemists, a very flamboyant man with a hair cut that would’ve made Don King blush, comes to help. He advises her to restart it and explains you have to do that at the start of each month. After a couple of decades in software development I’m appalled, but not surprised, that they might in fact have to do such a thing. Mary is now able to confirm that the system knows about my scripts.
She now moves to the high tech part of the operation, that really makes the IT system obsolete. There are large shelves with hundreds of brown paper bags containing people’s prescriptions. She finds one for “Rockel”, but it’s someone I’ve never heard of, despite it being an usual name. Again after years working on systems where patient confidentiality is paramount it seems a bit bizarre that she is just reading out names off of paper bags. But she doesn’t mean any harm, she’s just trying to help.
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