Tag Archives: pharmacy

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. AFGE Local 1904. Here we are 39 weeks past the “end of max telework” and the union, such as it is, still hasn’t come through on delivering the new and improved telework agreement. Now, I’m told, the alleged negotiation has gone so far sideways that it’s been sent to binding arbitration. Resolution to that could literally take years. So, we’re going to be grinding along for the foreseeable future with only two days a week like pre-COVID barbarians… as if 30 months of operating nearly exclusively through telework didn’t prove that working from home works. All this is ongoing while hearing stories of other organizations tucked in next door that are offering their people four or five day a week work from home options. I’m sure someone could make the case that there’s enough blame to go around, but since the updated and perfectly acceptable policy for supervisors was published 39 weeks ago, I’m going to continue to go ahead and put every bit of blame on Local 1904 for failing to deliver for their members (and those of us who they “represent” against our will) and for continuing to stand in the way like some bloody great, utterly misguided roadblock. No one’s interest is served by their continued intransigence. The elected “leaders” of AFGE Local 1904 should be embarrassed and ashamed of themselves.

2. Seeking approval. I needed approval on a concept package back on June 7th. That wasn’t my date, randomly pulled from the ether. That was the date echelons higher than reality said they needed it. Being a good staff officer, I did some backwards planning and placed the full package into our fancy automated senior leader review process on the 17th of May. That left 21 days – a full 3 weeks for them to review, object, make changes, or request substitutions. Not surprisingly, three weeks came and went with only radio silence. Two more weeks passed. Now we’re in Day 36 of review and two weeks past the deadline and finally word has trickled down that upon careful review, they want wholesale changes that bare little to no resemblance to what was sent in for perusal. Fine. I’m going to look like a dipshit when I send this along to the people who were expecting it way back in early June. This is the kind of thing that should be dead easy simple, but somehow every year turns into its very own fiasco. I don’t know why I expected this year’s effort to drag things across the finish line to be any different. 

3. Mail order pharmacy. I’ve been getting my meds through mail-order for years. Mostly it works reasonably well. My most recent refill order did not. The website said no, sorry, it can’t be done and referred me over to the 800 “customer service” phone number. I gamely called customer service, to be notified by the automated system that my request had been received and was processing. So now I have one automated system saying a refill is too hard to do and one saying that everything is good to go. It’s hard not to appreciate that level of consistency. The actual human person I was able to talk to after repeatedly screaming “representative” at the phone assured me that they order had been processed and would be in the outgoing mail by the end of the day. It’s supposed to arrive tomorrow, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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Presented for your approval, a mélange of topics that have made me want to alternately gouge out my own eyes, bludgeon others to death where they stood, and curl up in the fetal position and just have a good cry…

1. Being a whore. I sell my body for money, well, the brain part of my body anyway. I don’t usually give any particular thought to how my John wants to use me for the eight hours he pays for, but sometimes it’s just damned hard to ignore. I’ve run across very few things in my professional life that are more annoying that spending hours, days, or months working on something only to get told “woops, looks like we won’t need that now.” Whether what I’m working on ever sees the light of day or not, my time is reasonably well compensated. Still, it would be nice to know you’re whoring yourself out for something that’s actually going somewhere. You’d think a decade on, I’d be use to just lying back, opening my brain, and thinking of England, but I don’t seem to quite have the hang of it yet.

2. DVDs. Between movies and TV show season, I’m guessing that I have something like 500 disks that spend 99.999% of their time doing nothing but taking up shelf space. For all but a few favored movies or shows, they might only see the light of day once a year or less. The logical solution to no longer wanting these DVDs sitting around occupying limited storage space is to rip them to several large hard drives and serve them up through iTunes. That would be the logical solution except, of course, for the part where no one in the world offers a convenient method of extracting large amounts of data from DVD and converting it to an iTunes-ready file… and no, I don’t consider ripping and encoding one or two at a time to be a convenient method. Sadly, a quick cost/benifit analysis telles me that with the vast amount of time and effort involved in getting my movies from Point A to Point B the hard way, it might legitimately be more cost effective to just put all my DVDs into long term storage and build a new collection from scratch when I want to watch something. Just the thought of having to go that route annoys me to no end when there’s a far far less expensive, but ponderously over complicated solution to be had.

3. Walmart Pharmacy. I don’t know who gave these jokers my office phone number, but rest assured, I will not be coming in to pick up “my” two prescriptions no matter how many messages you leave. Even if they were my prescriptions, when you told me the bill was $510.64, I’d point at you, laugh, and walk away.