Real life | 30 May 2019

The receptionist fixed me with a withering stare. I had just filled out a repeat prescription form and politely inquired of the girl behind the desk how I would know when it was ready.

She harrumphed and asked where I usually picked my prescriptions up from. I told her the pharmacy on site, you know, the one next door to the surgery, the one just there, in the car park of this building. The one you could see out the window. That one.

She stared at me as though I were explaining that I collected my prescriptions from the international space station.

‘I’ll look it up,’ she said, as though my theory fell so far short of logic it was not worth even considering. ‘Date of birth?’ I don’t know why they don’t just give us a serial number. They could stamp it on our foreheads so they don’t even have to ask. They could reduce communication to nothing by scanning our heads with a hand-held scanner.

‘It says here,’ she said after tapping in my date of birth and coming up with only me, and no other patient with the same birth date, ‘that you pick up your prescriptions from Boots.’

‘Yes, the Boots next door to here.’

She shrugged. I decided to move things on a bit. ‘Will you send me a text when it’s ready… perhaps?’

This suggestion made her look so cross I wish I could have taken it back as I was saying it. But it was too late.

‘Text! We can’t send a text! We’ve got FAR too many patients to start sending them all texts!’

Right, so you’ve got so few patients you can put in someone’s date of birth and there’s only going to be them with that date of birth, but on the other hand you’ve got so many patients you couldn’t possibly text them about their medication.