The Long Wait

Before I left town for the weekend I needed to stop by CVS and pick up a prescription. The pharmacist told me it would take 20 minutes. An hour and a half later, I left CVS with my prescription. What took so long is the boring part of the story. In my hour in a half at CVS, I did a great deal of people watching. All of the condoms are placed directly in front of the pharmacy counter. It is hilarious to watch people try to be nonchalant about getting condoms. Really, there should be nothing to be embarrassed about. You are having sex. Good for you. You are being safe with your sex. Bonus points! The best thing about all these embarrassed people picking up their contraceptives is that they are in this special case. It's not really locked but as the directions state, you must push the button in front of the product you would like, open the tray and remove your item. If these steps are not followed in that specific order (which they rarely were) an announcement comes over the loud speaker. "Manager needed to assist customer in family planning." This announcement repeats until a manager resets the system. The added attention increased the squirming and was extremely amusing.

Security had to be called twice in my hour and a half of waiting. The first time was for a man who was screaming about customer service and his constitutional rights to share his opinion on CVS' customer service. The second time was about a half hour later. I heard the manager being paged to aisle 2. "Manager to aisle 2, manager to aisle 2." Directly followed by "security to aisle 2, security to aisle 2." Then the shouting started. The woman in aisle 2 screamed "oh no you didn't just call security on me." I was sitting at the end of aisle 10 and could hear her clear as day. The shouting continued and at one point I caught a glimpse of the manager with his hand on her shoulders trying to guide her out of the store. Of course, she was not happy with this. There was more shouting and she started throwing things. At one point the woman reentered the store. In the shuffle of trying to get her out again a baby was hit and the baby started wailing. To add to the mayhem, while all of this was going on the automated announcement kept repeating "Manager needed to assist customer in family planning." The manager was busy trying to remove the screaming, baby-hitting woman from the store and was unable to assist the guy in family planning. I think his face turned 8 shades of red. It was great and really helped me make it through my long wait. While CVS did take forever to fill my prescription, they did a great job entertaining me while I waited.