Quote of the day:

It’s hard for me to get used to these changing times. I can remember when the air was clean and sex was dirty.
—George Burns

The CEO of Rite Aid is an idiot and has mismanaged the company to the point that they closed a whole bunch of their stores last year. And they’re closing a whole bunch more this year. Including the one where I get my prescriptions. The one that is just a two or three block way away. It’s hard to say precisely because there are several half blocks and turns and, well, never mind. The point is they’re closing. Actually, the store has now closed.

But instead of doing the logical thing and forwarding my prescription information to the nearest CVS location, they forwarded it to the location on Walnut Street. Well, I don’t wanna walk to Walnut Street just to get my prescriptions. There’s a CVS that’s closer and just across the street from an Acme that I sometimes go to.

So now that my info is in the CVS data banks, switching to a different location should be simple. Right?

Uh-uh. As I found out to my frustration. 

I won’t go into all that gory details, but suffice it to say that I spent about half an hour on the web site, the iPhone app, and the automated voice phone system trying without success to get my store location switched. It can’t be done. Really, it literally cannot be done.

Moreover, once you get connected to the automated voice system on their phone, you can’t get to a human being. Cannot be done.

The best I found I could do was to say, over and over, “I wanna talk to a person!” I kept getting the reply that it it did not recognize it as one of the voice requests that it could act upon. But persistence sort of paid off, and it finally shot me over to a voice mail where I left a rather frustrated, maybe even an angry, message.

And I did receive a callback from a pleasant human, and I reminded myself that he was not the problem, so I remained civil as I explained what I was trying to do.

He confirmed that it was indeed impossible to change my CVS location. All that I could do was to change each prescription on a one by one basis. That is, order a refill on a prescription and at the end of the process indicate I wanted to pick it up at a different location. Not very intuitive, if you ask me, and certainly not very friendly. And he reminded me to change my prescription location at all my doctor sites so that new prescriptions will be routed to the right location. That’ll be fun.

But he did take my order for my cholesterol medication which was about to run out and he promised it would be ready by that night and since they are open 24 hours, I could pick it up that night. I said I’d probably be there around seven or eight the following morning. He said that would be fine.

All I can say is that whoever designed and/or programmed the CVS system is an idiot. Changing the location for all the prescriptions should be a very simple and basic function.