Amen, brother.

My third pharmacy-related blog entry in as many days…this may be turning into a pharmacy assistant blog.  Hey, at least I’ll provide lots of amusing stories if it does – about horrible, nasty, rude people who don’t understand that retail and pharmacy workers are human beings, and that drug laws exist for a damn good reason.

I pretty much think “Amen, brother” to pretty much everything The Angriest Pharmacist posts on his blog.  This man is occasionally what we on the Internet like to refer to as a troll, but he is funny as hell…and puts up with an incredible amount of crap on a daily basis.  The hilarious spin he puts on shitty customers (patients?) is priceless.  I think the thing I like most about him though is the way he refuses to take crap from people.

Like in this entry: to the best of my knowledge, no pharmacy in Australia would do this for a customer except in really exceptional circumstances.  Basically the deal is this: if the patient needs a repeat of a prescription, it’s up to them to call the doctor and make an appointment.  The Angriest Pharmacist says that even in the US, it’s a privilege for customers for the pharmacist to call up and arrange the repeat or refill – it is by no means something that the pharmacist is required to do.  This woman doesn’t seem to appreciate it in any way though.  In fact, she gets pissed at the pharmacist because the doctor’s on leave and the refill can’t be authorised over the phone.

TAP’s response? To tell this pain in the ass “this shit is not my problem, and if you don’t like it, go elsewhere.” As he was perfectly within his right to do.

In this post he talks about how a customer verbally abused him and treated him like shit, insisting that he – oh, what was it now? “Just put the pills in the bottle and shut up.” Again, this was over a prescription she needed refills for, which he would have to call the doctor about, instead of her doing it herself like she’s supposed to.  He tells her to leave his store and never come back, because he rightly refused to be treated that way.

I really, really admire that.  Because the ‘I want to see your manager/boss/supervisor’ line is dropped anywhere and everywhere some rude person wants to get their way, regardless of what rules they break or how horribly they treat someone.  If someone demands to see my boss (or anyone else’s) because of a legitimate error on the part of the store or organisation – if they were genuinely messed around, I have no problem with that.

The trouble is that people abuse this to death, particularly in businesses – like most retail businesses – that are very customer-service oriented.  At Toys R Us, I was made to return non-defective baby car seats that had been taken out of their packaging – it’s illegal to resell these, and we lost around two hundred dollars every time some idiot manager made me do the refund to shut some awful person up.  I’ve seen managers throw gift cards at rude, demanding customers who will stop at nothing to get something for free and in doing so rip off a business.  Essentially it rewards bad behaviour.  Every time something like that happens, this person gets the idea that they can behave like a complete asshat and possibly reduce another human being to tears and they will be rewarded for it.

I hate the ‘customer is always right’ mentality.  And I salute TAP for putting rude, nasty assholes in their place.  As of now, I am following his blog.  Again: amen, brother.  Amen.