I have the good fortune of working in a town that doubles in size every fall when it's college students return to class. It is my apparent lack of good fortune that has resulted in my being scheduled to work every year on Move-In Weekend for the past four years. Let's just say the stars were particularly misaligned at my birth.
Working on Move-In Weekend is not much fun for a pharmacist in a discount-retailer environment. Our more intelligent regular patients know to get their refills either before or after this most glorious of weekends. Which means that the only patients I see on Move-In Weekend are generally my biggest PITAs.
Besides dealing with my (least) favorite patients all weekend, I also get to interact with not only the incoming freshman class, but their hovering, helicopter parents. I do transfers for forgotten prescriptions, give directions to home-improvement stores (I really don't know why so many students need to locate a Home Depot or Lowes...could someone explain this to me?), dispense advice on allergies, antifungal creams, headaches, and what to put in a first-aid kit. Oh, and once the parents finally go home, I dispense A LOT of Plan B.
Mostly, I answer questions about where items are located in the store. My technician (who has now seen NINE Move-In-Weekends) and I decided to keep track of the various items we were asked for this weekend, to see which was the most popular:
Clearly, the colleges in my town do not include manicure essentials on their list of what to bring to school. Or condoms. And as noted previously, Plan B. In a few months I'll have to update my pharmacy word cloud to include "directions to Planned Parenthood."
Four years ago, I considered the future of our civilization as bright and full of promise. Today, I am not so sure. Yesterday, a Sunday, I had the pleasure of filling prescriptions from an on-call pulmonologist in California...at 10am New York time. He was woken up because one of his asthma patients had left his Advair, Singulair, and last, but not least, his Ventolin rescue inhaler, at home. I noted to the (helicopter) parents that I often see incoming students who forget their medications when packing. "Oh, no," said his mother. "He didn't forget to pack them. We just didn't think he would have any asthma symptoms when he got to New York. The weather is so much different here than in California." I really think colleges should start requiring common sense as well as academic prowess to be admitted.
Working on Move-In Weekend is not much fun for a pharmacist in a discount-retailer environment. Our more intelligent regular patients know to get their refills either before or after this most glorious of weekends. Which means that the only patients I see on Move-In Weekend are generally my biggest PITAs.
Besides dealing with my (least) favorite patients all weekend, I also get to interact with not only the incoming freshman class, but their hovering, helicopter parents. I do transfers for forgotten prescriptions, give directions to home-improvement stores (I really don't know why so many students need to locate a Home Depot or Lowes...could someone explain this to me?), dispense advice on allergies, antifungal creams, headaches, and what to put in a first-aid kit. Oh, and once the parents finally go home, I dispense A LOT of Plan B.
Mostly, I answer questions about where items are located in the store. My technician (who has now seen NINE Move-In-Weekends) and I decided to keep track of the various items we were asked for this weekend, to see which was the most popular:
Clearly, the colleges in my town do not include manicure essentials on their list of what to bring to school. Or condoms. And as noted previously, Plan B. In a few months I'll have to update my pharmacy word cloud to include "directions to Planned Parenthood."
Four years ago, I considered the future of our civilization as bright and full of promise. Today, I am not so sure. Yesterday, a Sunday, I had the pleasure of filling prescriptions from an on-call pulmonologist in California...at 10am New York time. He was woken up because one of his asthma patients had left his Advair, Singulair, and last, but not least, his Ventolin rescue inhaler, at home. I noted to the (helicopter) parents that I often see incoming students who forget their medications when packing. "Oh, no," said his mother. "He didn't forget to pack them. We just didn't think he would have any asthma symptoms when he got to New York. The weather is so much different here than in California." I really think colleges should start requiring common sense as well as academic prowess to be admitted.
