Double Flee A

reading

Once upon a time I worked for a company called Pyxis. They're a division of Cardinal health, a corporate, health mega-borg. Pyxis is the company that makes the kind of automated medication dispensers that are the most popular, which has been good for them. Just in the last year, they've set up a research and development division, which it makes sense to have. It also makes sense that they haven't needed to till now. As number one in a not-all-that-competitive field, the brand recognition they've got has carried them through bad products (medstation 2000 software version 1.19 q++) mainly without a blip.

Their bad products and the swollen budgets and high liabilities of healthcare did collide, though, once in 2001, to create a field of warmth, beauty and light. I got a job with them apologizing for their machines not working right, due to the aforementioned experimental software package (that one bombed) early in the winter of that year.

I had applied for a bunch of jobs on Monster.com and soon I got a call from a lady in a temp office who hired me immediately. My background at the time was very customer-service heavy and I had dabbled in pharmacy and those were the ingredients they were looking for. I wasn't supposed to fix stuff as much as apologize all day. Sounds crappy, right? It was at first, but it got better.

I worked twenty hours a week but soon a guy got fired and I got his hours, and then I was working forty eight hours a week. Things started getting better, operationally speaking, but the nurses kept complaining, so we stayed. The temp job lasted three months, then another three, then another. Then I got laid off but in a couple weeks I got rehired. About a year after our hires we all got canned and moved on. A guy I worked with got hired by Pyxis and now drives all over Minnesota fixing stuff at all hours of the night and day. I don't know where the others are. I wound up in the pharmacy of the hospital I was fixing Pyxises in, and am still called on to swing into action when something isn't working right.

The software situation is primarily a hazy blur to me, but the mechanisms of the machines are pretty much my bitch. I have fixed them with needles, oxygen tank wrenches, Kelly clamps; everything lying around in a hospital other than the patients. Because this is not normally a part of the job description of a pharmacy technician (which is what I am), I call my job Captain Fantastic. I even sometimes put on a name tag that says "Captain Fantastic!" Management doesn't mind, even though it's a dig on their inability to fence in my job duties on paper; they've been beaten into submission by the union garbage that's always going on like a three-ring circus without the clowns; when management-union relations backslide you just have to watch it all go to hell. There's mediation all the time, arbitration, shared governance, people registering grievances, it sounds awful.

Which means I can also answer the phone any way I want (within reason) and get away with that, too. I drawl slightly when I answer: "Innpatient phaarmacy, phaarmacy technician speeaking."

It's calcuated; just enough to irritate someone who needs to be irritated (like one pharmacist we have, who cuts me off at "Inpatient phaarmacy, phaa" with "Ok Dale? I really don't have time for that right now. So can you please stop doing that? Ok, can I speak to a pharmacist? Who's there right now?" She's dumb and doesn't see that her irritation has cost her more time than I ever could have. She also doesn't care. We all get a kick out of how much she sucks.) but not enough to register as strange to anyone calling from outside, like another pharmacy or a doctor. Many other people, pharmacists mostly, within the hospital who regularly hear me do it find it entertaining and useful; they know who I am right away and also what I can do and what I can't, as an individual, without my having to say my name. --punctuation note, I really don't like footnotes so I'm parenthesizing pro re nata, nunc pro tunc-- (I don't like saying my name when I answer the phone. That's kind of too personal to belong to the hospital if you ask me. I've settled on telling them who thy're speaking to 'professionally'. That's fair.) I also do that because I get bored a lot.

When I worked for Pyxis I had a lot of free time, some of which I spent consorting with a nurse's aide who would later become my wife, and before she came along, reading. Once I had the rare privilege of going to a bookstore (Booksmart in Uptown, excellent staff and inventory) and asking for the longest book they had. They gave me the unabridged Count of Monte Cristo, which I read at work. It was excellent. I read a lot in that year, both at work and on my ways to and from it on the half hour bus ride.

I don't get to read that much any more and I miss it, but I do find time for this internet BS at all hours, so I've really traded my actual free time and have no free time while I'm getting paid. If free time is a shrinky-dink, work is a hot oven. They get bigger, right? If they shrink, then change that to something that gets bigger. God, why are you even reading this?

Anyway, I just got done reading Ubik by Philip K. Dick and am now reading Hitler moves East by Paul Carrell, which J got me for Christmas. It's great, Ubik was good, too.

posted by dale @ 9:00 AM