One Damn Thing After Another

“My whole life ended in forty five minutes”, remarked my Uber driver on the way to a medical appointment, his participation owing to my inability to bend my right knee sufficiently to enter my WRX.

I hadn’t intended on extracting his life story but one thing had led to another. “Maybe these are hints to slow down?” he mused after I shared the long backstory of my “complicated” leg interwoven with the more recent tale of my rotator cuff woes. “Maybe”, I replied, “but I have adopted a contrary approach, taking these as reminders that my life could end at any moment and so I had better live it fully now”.

“My whole life ended in forty five minutes” thus replied my Uber driver who, just minutes earlier, seemed the type to spend the whole ride in silence until I broke the ice with “well at least with this surgery I don’t have to ask you to buckle my seatbelt like I’m five”. My carpe diem vibe seemed to have struck a nerve.

He had fled Venezuela seven years earlier when “guys with guns” showed up at his family’s civil engineering firm to nationalize it. “My life was a dream and then all of it was gone in a few moments” he remarked stoically. He was driving for Uber from 0400-1000 stacked with a full time civil engineering job to send home as much money as possible. “My whole family has nothing and there is nothing to be had” he said, further noting, in case it needed emphasis, that when his mother recently required surgery he not only had to front the cash but even purchase and ship the medical supplies required to perform the operation. “If it had been an emergency”, he added, “then she just would have died because there would have been no time”.

“Even if you have nothing you still have everything here”, he observed of America. Clean water, reliable electricity, reasonable healthcare, functional supermarkets… “Walmart!”, he exclaimed, noting how impossibly amazing it is to get everything he needs in one store instead of cobbling it together across trips to half a dozen different merchants. Prefacing it with the admission that I had never experienced anything like he had, I did note how overwhelmed with gratitude I have been whereupon returning from two weeks in Colombia my first stop would be a full service American grocery store, the entitlement having been reset by a “rest of world” experience.

I found myself reflecting on the recent election and the absurdity that the richest and most powerful country in the world seems poised to petulantly smash itself to bits simply for want of the ability to have some adult conversations about priorities and tradeoffs. “Do you get to speak with your family much?”, I asked. “When they have electricity”, he replied. I pondered the handful of occasions in the last five years where supply and/or demand shocks caused store shelves to run bare and imagined a local reality where that had gone from anomalous to normal.

My medical appointment itself proved largely uninteresting. It did, however, trigger a cascade of events that are far more amusing to recount now than they were to live in the moment when it had me, beyond tactical frustration, wondering what it would be like not to be able to get life saving antibiotics at all because my society had collapsed. The no-big-deal vascular surgery I had had performed on my “complicated” leg two weeks earlier had escalated a week later to actually-a-huge-fucking-deal status when I got admitted to the hospital for most of a week owing to an infection at one of the incisions that proved equal parts terrifying and excruciating. Now, three days after my release, I was hearing that the culture of the abscess had come back differently than earlier expected, necessitating a rejiggering of the oral antibiotics I had been prescribed upon discharge.

Before hailing an Uber to take me from the doctor to pharmacy I had the presence of mind to call ahead to see if I could cajole a pharmacist into prioritizing filling my script given my messy logistics and medical urgency. “We don’t have a script for you”, the pharmacist stated. “Uh, my doctor just sent it over”, I replied. “Maybe she sent it to the wrong pharmacy?”, she suggested. “I don’t think so”, I said, knowing that I had pointed at the pharmacy’s info on my phone and been like “you sent it here, yes?”, and gotten a “yes” from her. “Well, maybe it’s in one of our queues — let me look”, she said. “Nothing here, nothing there, not here either, nope nope nope… hrm let me put you on hold while I listen to the four voicemails and see if your script is in there” she thoughtstreamed as I pondered the Data Engineer’s hell in which she and her compatriots lived daily.

“Can’t find it!”, she said, noting that one of the voicemails was so garbled as to be undecipherable. “So, does that mean it’s lost?”, I asked. “Ehhh probably not”, she replied. “No?”, I asked. “Firewalls”, she said, “can sometimes make it take a while”. “Firewalls?”, I wondered, imagining someone having to crank down a digital drawbridge every time a packet was sent. She may as well have said “quantum carburetor” for all I expected of her techical expertise. I gave up, prayed to the data flow gods that my script was in flight, and called an Uber to the pharmacy.

“Do you have my script for keflex?”, I asked in person thirty minutes later, having arrived by way of another Uber driver who by some crazy coincidence had given me a ride home from another medical appointment in June. “We do not”, came the reply. “Are you sure?”, I asked. “I’ll go look through our queues”, she said, and maybe five minutes later the answer still came back negative. I put my head in my hands on the counter to think for a moment. “Let me call the doctor’s office”, I said.

The assistant at the doctor’s office, when pressed on the matter, sheepishly admitted that that the script had gotten “stuck”. “Can you unstick it?”, I asked. “I’ll put it in as a priority”, she replied. “How soon does that mean it will go out?”, I asked. “Ten minutes”, she said. Having hung up I went back to the pharamacy desk and told them the score. “I’m going to walk across the plaza to get lunch”, I noted, adding “can you please please please fill this script as soon as it comes through so I can go home?”. “Of course!”, yet another pharmacist said. And so I went to lunch, knowing that the only certain thing in my near future was lunch, all else being subject to the whims of a Kafkaesque patchwork of loosely coordinated bureaucracies.

“Do you have my script for keflex?”, I again asked, returning from lunch. “Still haven’t seen it”, yet another pharmarcist replied. “FAAAAHHHHHK”, I thought to myself, and then called the doctor’s office again. “Haha, oops, looks like it went to the pharmacy here instead of the Harmons”, the assistant cheerily noted. “Uh, can you just re-send it to the right place?”, I asked. “I’m not able to do that”, she unhelpfully replied. “Is there anything you can do to resolve this?”, I asked. “I have no way to help you”, she replied. “Could we, I dunno, like, you know, have the correct pharmacy call the wrong pharmacy and ask for it to be transferred?”, I asked. “Oh, yeah, you could totally do that if you want”, she replied, causing me to grind my teeth.

“We’ve got your script!”, a pharmacist shouted, just as my call waiting indicated a call from the doctor’s office. I picked up the call. “We want to do amoxicillin instead of keflex”, the nurse said, as the pharmacist was bagging me up to go. “So, funny thing about this”, I said resignedly to the pharmacist — “now they want to switch out the keflex for amoxicillin instead”. As I tried to figure out what the hell was going on the pharmacist began cranking down the shutters for the shop. Apparently 1330 is lunch time and lunch time is SRS BSNS there. “Have you even seen the amoxicillin script yet?”, I asked forlornly. “Nope!”, a pharmacist replies, and finishes lowering the portcullis.

So I sit and fume for thirty minutes in the waiting room. Eventually the window re-opens. They say my script has been filled. “I know, but you said it was with the keflex… have you even received the script for amoxicillin yet?”, I asked. “That’s the one we filled”, they replied, adding that they never received any script for keflex. “Are you sure?”, I ask incredulously. She looks in the bag — “yup, got the amoxicillin right here; sorry about that”. “Take the win”, I thought to myself, grateful to be done with the ordeal but also infuriated by how insanely badly engineered the system was.

“File transfer — still an unsolved problem in [fill in current year]”, a particular colleague and I would remark to each other 10-15 years ago on frustrating days at the office like this one, puzzling how everything seemed to come down to that. Apparently nothing has changed despite all of our shiny new toys. Is this what I need to fix next? Maybe.