The good news is that I’m working on Day 2 of “Not Having a Migraine”. This is unfortunately due in no part to my choice in pharmacies.
I’ve been using the local location of a large, national pharmacy chain whose name brings to mind a large national retailer that many love to hate. That business relationship is going to change sometime soon. Even though it’s less convenient, I’m going to attempt to go with one of our remaining locally owned pharmacies.
The reason for this is because this bunch has sat on a new prescription for a migraine preventative for nearly a week. Didn’t fill it, didn’t call, made no attempt to contact me. This is in direct opposition to their normal mode of incompetence, which has to been to attempt to fill every new prescription regardless of instruction. This has caused endless havoc with my insurance as they’ve attempted to fill things “off cycle”. It’s a minor pain to straighten out, but still, it’s an irritant I don’t need and am no longer willing to tolerate.
I was patiently waiting to hear if the insurance was going to pay, and just as importantly, how much they would pay, on this new drug. It’s the third high-dollar preventative that I’m on, and the neurologist and I had already discussed Plan B in case they would only pay if I went off one of the other two expensive drugs. Fortunately, they’re picking it up as a $0 copay for now. I’m a bit shocked.
After six days of nothing, I decided to call. You can’t call and get an actual person on the line-unless you know that many poorly programmed voice response systems will accept “O for Operator” at any time and will generally send you to an actual person. After an interminable wait, I went through all the details, only to find out I’m talking to some national call center, who can do nothing other than connecting me to the local store, which is what I had been after the entire time. Once connected, I had to “Please Hold” through 4 wait cycles. About the time I was going to hang up and go torture the information out of someone in person, I got a body. Said body finally understood that I was trying to get information, what information I was trying to get and finally got someone in the pharmacy to talk to me.
See why I titled this a “Broad Spectrum Incompetence”? Good customer service can be hard work, but it isn’t difficult work-unless your system makes it so. I spent a career in Information Technology, which is a service organization. I made sure that my help desks were actually helpful. I must be some sort of outlier.
The “Housekeeping” note is that I’m not going to do a Fine Art Tuesday post today. Today is scheduled to be theater, and that’s one of the ones I’m not so good on. I think I need to reconsider what subjects I can reliably make a decently readable post on and stick to that list. But not today. Today is going to be mostly recovery time. Hopefully I can make some sense on some subject tomorrow.
