Nothing like spending eight years in college and post-graduate studies to qualify to work on an assembly line.
The irony is rich. At 20, my youngest son took a temporary job working on the production line at the chicken processing plant to earn cash for college. On his 21st birthday he had no big party celebrating the milestone, only another day of moving trays of frozen chicken and hours spent in a classroom and over books pursuing a degree in biology.
That degree took him into one of the labs of the human genome project where, shortly before his 26th birthday he – and thousands of others – celebrated the completion of mapping a rough draft of the human genome. Although more research followed, he returned to the classroom to study pharmacy.
Four years later he accepted his doctorate in pharmacy and a job filling pill bottles. He settled behind the counter until circumstances lead him to look elsewhere for employment.
That’s when he entered the world of mail-order prescriptions. It is big business, with lots of pharmacists working at tasks few folks realize a pharmacist does. He really liked his desk job in pharmacy; he could even do some of it at home from his computer. The company mandated overtime. He called customers/patients, chatted a bit with them about their medications: when and how they took them and any activity or product they might be using that might be helpful or contra-indicated with the medication and wrote a report.
After the swing shifts of the grocery store pharmacy, he welcomed the regular nine-to-five hours of office work. But the mail-order company had other plans for his desk job. Within months they out-sourced it hundreds of miles away and left him with three weeks to find another job – within the company or otherwise.
He returned to the last place he expected to be.
He landed on a production line, working the night shift five-six days a week with mandatory overtime some weeks. He landed on a production line that employed only licensed pharmacists who verified the output of robot pill dispensers.
Pharmacy technicians dump bar coded boxes of pills into the machines that electronically count out pills to fill prescriptions. The robots do a good job, but no prescription leaves the pill popping plant until a pharmacist manually inspects and approves that the robot has correctly filled the prescription. If something looks a even a bit odd, the pharmacists pull the prescription off the line to be scrutinized and fixed before it is shipped for home delivery.
In this wave of the future pharmacy, my son works with 20 pharmacists on one of the two 10-hour shifts checking prescriptions at a state of the art factory line with machinery designed for accuracy and cleanliness. For each pharmacist there are two to four pharmacy technicians at work. Filling medications is big business.
At this plant potential customers tour a couple times a week seeking the best source for their employees’ mail order medications. The pharmacy company works hard to welcome and impress prospective customers – including mandating pharmaceutical smocks on visitor day. “White coats for pharmacists and blue for techs, but they don’t call them that,” my son sighed. On visitor day, everyone wears a coat/smock including those who only work at computers.
“At school we were told that a grocery store pharmacy would feel pretty good if they filled 200 prescriptions in a day,” my son said. “At this plant our goal is to fill 70,000 prescriptions in a day.”
Medicine is big business these days and requires highly trained persons to perform the same crucial medical procedures over and over. So, after eight years of education and two graduations my son, who just needed a job to support his family, returned to the assembly line – as a pharmacist.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. E-mail her at joanh@everybody.org.)