Bits and bobs
So it's been a little while since I've written anything, though traffic has gone up during this time for reasons I am unclear on. I can only imagine what it would be like if I'd continued writing steadily.
Back in January, I changed pharmacies — same chain, just a different location. I worked OT for ~10-15 hours a week for the entire month of January just to get the pharmacy under control. I probably sent back ~$50-60,000 worth of overstock — most of it in topicals. Spent a bunch of time creating a brain-dead easy supply chart so we don't load up the back room with unnecessary supplies. We've gone from overflowing shelves (of everything) and an overflowing supply area down to inventory that's more manageable. It was worth the extra effort. Anyone that's ever worked in a pharmacy with an inventory problem can attest to that.
I've always known — and taken for granted — that the easiest way to get people to do what you want is to make it easier for them to do the right thing than it is to do the wrong thing. In terms of the little stuff, like supplies, it means making the open boxes more accessible, and having them clearly labelled as to what they are so we don't have 6 open boxes of the same thing. You know, stuff that is so STUPIDLY easy that no one does it.
I can't help but think that if we were an independent store with an actual owner where every extra box of 40/60 dram easy-open caps and the extra 15 boxes of Taclonex came out of a real person's pocket, this would never have happened.
I hate wasteful anything. It gets under my skin in a way that dragging fingernails down a chalkboard bothers everyone else.
Personally speaking, I've been quite healthy in the last two months, which is a nice change from the end of 2007. I've identified the main food-based trigger that aggravates my gastritis — ice cream. (*sob*)
I won't bother to link my "about me" page again, because it largely talks about personal failures of mine that I don't care to revisit, but I think I've *finally* figured out what I think I'd really excel at studying formally. This has been difficult, because over the years I've had professors take me aside and tell me that I should "seriously consider" studying the following: physics, computer science, English, mathematics, and medicine. (As though my ego has ever needed any outside help.)
The trouble comes in that I've always been *terrible* at finishing anything. Start with a bang, get bored, and jump to the next interesting thing. The other trouble is that I've never really found any discipline that marries all of my (diverse) interests and skills. Math is beautiful when I can get into it; computing (and programming) knowledge has always been helpful — and occasionally studying it has been fun; before I got a computer, I checked out every physics book the public library had and read them all; medicine is, and always will be, fascinating; and writing is just something I've always done in the background — though I once discounted it as a useless skill.
You can see — I'm all over the map. What to do?
It hit me one day while I was browsing the web, as I am wont to do. I was looking through the course offerings at my state university, seeing what was interesting so that I could take some classes. I found myself avoiding the hard sciences because I could probably recite all of the degree programs and their requirements, and instead I focused elsewhere.
Where I stumbled upon Economics.
…and knew almost immediately that this was it. I looked over the requirements, looked at my transferred credits, and concluded that it should take me about a year to finish with a modest bit of effort. Having 160 undergraduate and professional credits really helps there. I think the main reason it really spoke to me was because basic economics principles are the basis of, well, everything.
From there… who knows. I'd like to finish pharmacy, since it's where I fell in love with clinical science, something I'll always have, regardless of where I end up. And there's nothing wrong with a PharmD and a license to practice pharmacy to fall back on. I guess the main practical thing is that it will open doors that are currently closed to me. That stupid piece of paper is really very important to everyone on the planet, it seems. Interesting that personal merit and skill are meaningless until you have that piece of paper, and then mean everything afterwards.
But then I guess it's as good a minimum barrier to entry as any.
Alright that's enough personal bullshit for now. I've got a couple of posts that have been brewing that are actually pharmacy-related…
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