Tag Archives: efficiency

Day 187

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X-Ray Day.

It went surprisingly well. The taxi was prompt, the journey was quick, the driver was pleasant. I arrived early, was X-Rayed and left the department at 10.52, which was good when you consider my appointment time was 10.50. The journey home a re-run of the previous journey. I have some acidic observations but will save them for another post.

I had an inkling that something was going quite so well for Julia when I arrived home. She had left to walk down to the surgery before I left, and was still not home. I didn’t panic, as there is always a possibility she had taken a detour on the way, such as shopping or chatting to a friend. One of the advantages of being miserable and anti-social is that you don’t get delayed by people wanting to get involved in pointless social rituals. If it doesn’t involve biscuits, keep to yourself, is my view.

When she returned, a tale of woe unfolded. She arrived early, booked in and waited. And waited. After 40 minutes she was about to ask what was happening when the nurse appeared. It seems that someone had turned up and insisted that they had an appointment when there wasn’t one on the system. They were very insistent so the nurse took them through just to shut them up. It took 40 minutes to sort them out and made everyone else late.

One the face of it, it’s bad and it has just encouraged the patient to throw their weight about next time they don’t get their own way. On the other hand I recently had a case where they claimed there was no appointment on the system when I know I made it and they had it, because it had come up in conversation about something else.

Ah well, cosmic balance and all that.

The Queue

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Sorry, I had to repeat the header picture again. I was going to take more photos today, but didn’t do any in the end.

We went to the pharmacy this afternoon. Julia needed more medication and we had ordered mine at the same time to cut down on the number of times we risked contact, both for us and the pharmacy staff.

They open at 2am. We went down at 2.15 and found a queue of approximately 18 people. We decided to have a drive round and come back later when the rush was over. At 2.50 we returned and found the queue had reduced to 17, though most of them were different people. Several of the people who had been at the back of the original queue had still not reached the shop.

Reluctantly, we joined the queue. As I said to Julia, it was a good thing she had arranged to pick her prescription up in advance, or we’d have ended up in a massive slow queue.

She told me to shut up. Apparently sarcasm does not make queues go faster. An hour later, I found myself agreeing with her. I nearly said: “At least it isn’t raining.”

If I’d said that, I’m sure it would have done. So I restrained myself.

The woman in front of us had her son with her. He was about 12 or 14 and about the same size as her. He had learning difficulties, which originally took the form of engaging in a game of pointing at me and laughing whilst saying “man” and “giant”. He also said “hello” a lot, asked our names and named our hair colours – in my case this was “blonde” so I can forgive him a lot. As they queued, and he became bored, he started wrestling with his mother. She was impressively strong, and very patient. I’m guessing that the lockdown is harder for her than it is for many of us.

As we got to the door of the shop, the woman in front let them take her place, which was pretty good considering it had taken us an hour by that time.

Julia went in before me. I went in a couple of minutes later. She got hers in five minutes, as it was already organised. It was to take me another half hour. I gave them the barcode the surgery had texted me. It didn’t work.

So much for technology.

I had to go across to the surgery. Biosecurity was not as tight as last week, and I was able to walk straight in. Strange, I thought. What was even stranger was the way they had piled up furniture and tape as a barrier. And the fact there was nobody there.

I double checked the notices – there were many prohibitions (this situation is heaven-sent for people who like giving orders) including telling me not to enter if I had an appointment, but there was nothing telling me not to just drift in from the street. Strange…

Eventually someone found me, issued a paper prescription and, after checking my identity on my driving license, gave me a password for the website, which should mean I can just order online in future. In theory. I’ll believe it when I see it.

And that was…

No, that wasn’t quite it.

They were short of Warfarin and had no pain-killing gel. The gel will be in on Monday and the Warfarin on Tuesday. I am, it seems, welcome to queue for an hour any time next week to pick the extras up. I can even queue twice, once on Monday and once on Tuesday, if I want.

This, as I pointed out, rather works against the whole point of self-isolation.