Random thoughts while standing in line at the pharmacy.
Random Thought No. 1 -- Wow. There are really a lot of people in this line. And all of them, except me, are sick. At this moment.
Random Thought No. 2 -- You remember earlier this year when we were all wrapping ourselves in plastic bags and trying to ban travel to everywhere except Topeka and generally having medically induced hissy fits because Ebola was going to get us all? Maybe we actually should all have been getting flu shots.
Random Thought No. 3 -- Is there anything more depressing than standing in line at a pharmacy? I mean, we're talking Russian Gulag here. No one wants to be here, you have to be sick to be here and anyone who isn't coughing is sneezing. You should get a bowl of borscht when you get to the end.
Random Thought No. 4 -- There's a really good reason you should keep your cell phone charged up during the day. Someone might try to call you. You might have an emergency. Or, your phone's battery might expire while you're standing in an impossibly long line and the only thing to occupy you, aside from the coughing and sneezing, will be the television hanging in the pharmacy. Unfortunately, the only thing the television will show is commercials for all the products available in pharmacy. About half of the actual screen time will be devoted to describing side effects so horrific they are completely indistinguishable from the disease they're supposed to cure.
Headaches, fever, aches, incontinence (I have no idea what that is, but I bet it doesn't have anything to do with geography), sleeplessness, depression, mood swings and that whole "lasting more than four hours" thing. Really have to wonder if I just wouldn't rather be sick.
Random Thought No. 5 -- I have this theory that, if you're not actually sick, you can't get sick while standing in line to pick up a prescription for someone else. That's because germs respect benevolence. OK, I say theory, you say pipe dream. Tomato, toe-maw-toe.
Random Thought No. 6 -- It's important to remember I'm in this line out of love, out of devotion and out of the obviously mistaken belief that the drive-through line was moving too slow.
Random Thought No. 7 -- So, am I so bad at lines because I can't follow directions, don't like to be told what to do or have a tiny little attention span? How about "all of the above?" It's important to remember I was the kid in kindergarten whose parents were told "he can color in the lines, but he can't stand in them."
Random Thought No. 8 -- The last time I had to stand in a line this long for one of my kids, we made it all the way through to the Batman Roller Coaster only to find out the clown poster at the beginning of the line had been a little more forgiving, height-wise, than the one at the end. After just a little crying and screaming (and I think my child was upset, as well), they let us on anyway. As I recall, the kid wound up barfing on me. So, basically, that trip ended the same way.
Random Thought No. 9 -- Pharmacy lines. Think of them as a doctor's waiting room without chairs. Or bad magazines. But with roughly the same number of sick people.
Random Thought No. 10 -- Look, I imagine being in the medical profession and spending all your days helping people get well has to be tremendously rewarding. My hat's off to anyone who hears that call and follows it. But whenever you think your job isn't so grand, just remember you didn't go to years of college and post-graduate training, plus all the effort that had to be put in before they'd even let you actually go to work, just so you could stand in a doorway and tell someone how to use a suppository. Particularly when that person had no idea that's what he'd been prescribed. Or that there was medicine that actually was supposed to work like that.
Yep, just when you thought your day stunk ...
Random Thought No. 11 -- On the bright side, I could be at home being subjected to "The Bachelor." So, maybe this line's not so bad. Here, you can go ahead of me ...
Gary Smith is a recovering journalist living in Rogers.
Commentary on 01/16/2015