If you work in a customer-facing job, you’re gonna have good days and bad days.

That comes with the territory and you have to keep your cool and power through the days where everything seems to be blowing up in your face.

In today’s story, a pharmacy worker told readers about a particularly stressful day at their job.

Let’s take a look!

Yes, she is leaving.

“Today I walked in to work at the pharmacy and Mike, one of my favorite pharmacists, turned to me and said, “Run.”

You see, as I found out as I was clocking in, our lead tech was out with both a busted car and a pinched nerve in her back. Three of the insurance processors were down meaning half our claims weren’t going through.

New Guy was the only “tech” on duty for the first two hours of the day which basically meant we had the equivalent of a head trauma victim running the pickup counter. Tina and Jen were frantically typing prescriptions as fast as they could and backing up the pickup counter.

I clocked in and Jen said to me, “Fill. Just fill as fast as you can without hurting anyone.”

It was gonna be a rough day…

So I did.

I put myself at the production station, set my phone on the counter to play the Galaxy News Radio playlist from Fallout 3 (real quiet like so the customers couldn’t hear it) and started printing labels and pulling drugs as fast as I could.

Pop those caps off, shake the pills into the Kirby (a counting machine) and slap the labels on. Throw it in a basket and the basket onto a stack. Repeat.

I have a small cut on my index finger from twisting the hell out of the safety caps on the stock bottles (seriously why do bottles of 1000 need safety caps?) and broke a nail on a box of lids when I ripped the cardboard open because I didn’t have anything with an edge to get through the tape.

I have no idea how many prescriptions I filled today or how many phone calls I answered. I typed seven prescriptions and rung up one person. I spent my entire day slinging pills and listening to the landslide of crazy throw people up against the counters for the entertainment of a capricious god.

What a mess!

My pharmacists weren’t able to check off on prescriptions for longer than twenty minutes without being interrupted by patient consultations, new prescriptions being called in, requests for OTC recommendations for “my friend who has a rash.” And the aforementioned landslide of crazy.

There was a woman who called in repeatedly to demand a satisfactory explanation as to why her kid’s Accutane prescription hadn’t been filled.

Accutane can cause liver damage and serious birth defects so there are extra steps you have to take to get a prescription filled.

Well as it turned out the reason the prescription didn’t process was that we filled it the first time for one of the generics which turned out to be more expensive than the last time she had gotten it filled so she wanted us to change it.

Well the doctor hadn’t written it for the right generic so we had to call and get him to change the prescription, then cancel out the first fill and re-do it.

Which is where the screwed up insurance processors messed up the whole thing and our system freaks out because it thinks we’re trying to fill the prescription twice and hurt the patient. The mom was not happy.

Oh, boy…

At one point she was yelling at me on the phone because we “told her it was processing and being filled” and not bothering to mention that we’d filled it once and she didn’t want to pay forty extra bucks.

Then there was the woman who was mad as hell because her prescription wasn’t ready. She came in around 3:30, was told it wasn’t ready because of being short staffed and the landslide of crazy and said she would come back later.

Came back later, was told it still wasn’t ready and proceeded to lose her mind because “That little man” told her it would be ready.

That little man was Norm who is two feet taller than her and also 80 years old. Norm doesn’t take grief from anyone but he was busy so I had to step up.

I pointed out that she had been in at 3:30 and Norm hadn’t started until 5.

My coworkers had been trying to force it through her skull that the reason her pills weren’t ready is because her idiot doctor had called in the prescription to two different pharmacies and the other one had filled it first.

“Why would he do that, I gave him your number!” the entire store could hear her, “I’ve never gotten anything from that other store!”

Of course, we can totally ready your mind and predict the inner workings of your doctor’s fumble witted staff.

I imagined a 500 count bottle of Metformin hitting her in the face, filled her prescription and rang her out while she railed on the phone about this “piece of garbage store.”

Have a good evening you crazy psycho.

I can’t stand Metformin. It smells like rotting fish.

So I filled. I filled and filled and changed playlists and filled some more. And because my pharmacist kept getting interrupted for both genuine issues as well as the landslide of crazy I had piles and piles of prescriptions that weren’t being checks and set to the waiting bins to be picked up.

I was running out of counter space, and running out of baskets. I sent in the order for the drugs we will need tomorrow at 7:30. The next time I looked at the clock it was 9:15.

This was a looooong day.

I thought to myself, “Well I could clock out, I was supposed to be off at nine, but there is still a ton of stuff left to fill.” So I stayed and filled some more. Finally 10:30 rolled around and I turned to the night pharmacist and said, “I’m going home.”

There were still people in line. Still a hundred or more prescriptions needing to be filled. Still the crazy. But I was now into my second hour of overtime for the day and hungry enough to start eating the empty bottles.

The pharmacist thanked me for staying so long. I punched out, grabbed my stuff and headed out in front of the counter. As I passed the line I heard one of the people waiting say, almost in disbelief, “She’s leaving?”

“Yes.” I said very quietly as I pushed open the door to the back, “She is going home. She was supposed to be off at 9 o’clock.”

Check out how readers reacted.

This person chimed in.

Another reader shared their thoughts.

This individual spoke up.

Another Reddit user was impressed.

This sounds like one of those days at work that we all dread…

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.