A real interaction between a pharmacy cashier and a customer that I overheard with my very own ears in Crooksville, OH, last week.
Granted, I didn’t have high expectations for the combination pharmacy-hardware store, but WOW.
What shocking covid-related things have you encountered lately?
My pulmonary doctors entire office will not wear masks.
A fucking pulmonary doctor and his entire staff do not mask.
Yeah… I’m not immunocompromised but I am high risk due to my lung problems… a recent visit I went in, wearing a mask. I asked the gal at the desk if they had masks, and she sort of pointed to a table nearby and said if I had someone with me they were welcome to a mask from over there.
I told her ‘no maam, for yall. I have emphysema and I am at high risk of hospitalization or worse if I were to get a Covid infection.’
She told me the staff was vaccinated, and that we could be seated and the dr would see me shortly.
I left. I’m looking for a new pulmonologist but seeing as I’m from a small town in hillbilly Texas my options are few. I may actually be stuck w this doctor.
In the before-times no staff anywhere, at least that I knew, would ever have refused to wear a mask for a patient request. It is absurd how blatantly politicized this genuinely unprecedented virus is to where all social norms are essentially evaporating to a collective trauma around… a few weeks of very lenient stay-home policies in some places, I guess. We’re so cooked lol
Right? That’s all it took.
I mean frankly, they should be in a mask all day long. EVERY SINGLE PATIENT without exception, by the very nature of the doctor’s specialized services is at increased risk. I wasn’t an exception, I was the norm.
We are absolutely cooked.
Yikes. Vaccinated does not mean you can’t transmit it. You’d think a medical staff would understand that.
Baller move on your part, hope you’re able to find another place
This was three weeks ago. Luckily the nature of the visit was just a routine check in, and chance for refills if needed. At the moment my emphysema is managed so the visit technically could have been via phone/telepresence/etc. I called when I got home and got another six months of scripts called in. Hopefully that is the time needed to get a referral and transfer away from this Dr.
She told me the staff was vaccinated, and that we could be seated and the dr would see me shortly.
This shit right here is why I still view provax libs as just as bad as antivax chuds, just 2 different ways to ignore science and continue the spread
Being pro vaccines isn’t the bad part. Being antimask is the bad part. Ideally everyone should be getting vaccinated and wearing masks. If we were forced to pick only one intervention, masking would be the one to choose but we can have both
Truly.
Owner of auto shop the other day: “yeah after i got covid the third time my doctor told me i don’t gotta worry about it anymore”
I also haven’t seen a masked pharmacist at either of the pharmacies I’ve been to around here in two years.
I wonder if the doctor actually said that or got sick of dealing with his dumbass patient and went “Fuck it. Go get murked by a preventable illness.”
Nah I fully believe the doctor said that. Whole system is completely fucked
I got my new vaccine in a small, unventilated room from a pharmacist who only wore a mask after I asked her to. The people ahead of me in line weren’t wearing masks, either.
How much did it cost? They’re $180 here without insurance. The health department gives them out free to the uninsured, but they don’t have the new boosters yet.
I’m on Medicaid, so at least it was free. Only some soreness this time around, and not nearly as bad as the side effects from the first two or three vaccines.
dude seriously. my insurance covers covid tests but Walgreens just refuses to charge the insurance company
So frustrating. I went through three pharmacies before i found one that was able to 1. understand/believe that some insurance still covers them, 2. could figure out how to do it, and 3. had tests that weren’t a year past the already-extended expiration.
I’ve just been buying them on amazon.
I almost resorted to that, filling out the reimbursement form every time (I’ve been stockpiling the max amount every month) seemed like a pain though
the combination pharmacy-hardware store
There’s allegory about America in there somewhere but I just can’t find it.
The store likely grew out of a general store/trading post, eventually specializing in whatever they sold the most of as grocery, department, and convenience stores became more widespread. Actually not that uncommon in the US since a lot of medications don’t require any special kind of storage and can just sit on a shelf.
Maybe they are regional things? I’ve lived in the US and I don’t recall seeing any drug & hardware stores even though I might have seen some. Google was pretty bad and after I carefully spoonfed it - combination drugstore/hardware stores - my results were only for Alaska and the Northwest.
edit: you sure the map didn’t just freak out on you? I’m seeing google giving results for Texas and Ohio.
One of google’s many problems is google insists on “helping” by giving everybody customized results. As far as I know - it’s impossible to share generalized results. I don’t live in the Northwest or Alaska and my VPN locates me in Denver. Why google didn’t talk about Ohio and Texas is a mystery.
Rant: Fucking google.
Ninja edit: Bing is even worse than google!
in wisconsin and south dakota I’ve seen tons of combination hardware store liquor stores. pharmacy/hardware store is a bit oddball, but I wouldn’t think twice if I saw one either
Well, I had my gallbladder removed recently and not only did they not replace my mask after I was out of surgery, none of the nurses were wearing masks either
My anesthesiologist and surgeon did, but it’s not helpful that the people who were spending the most time around me weren’t
They’re in close contact with many more people than the doctors!
Had to go to my doctor to renew a prescription and confirm that my stomach hadn’t exploded (it hadn’t). Nobody was wearing masks except one old lady in the waiting area, including the doctor.
Death to America.
(For context my partner is high risk for covid so we are extremely cautious. I work remote but my job sucks so I’m trying to find something better, doing everything I can to not take in-person jobs, because if I took covid home and it killed or disabled them then that would be awful ).
Some asshole recruiter tried to neg me because he emailed me about a remote job, then in the call he revealed that sike! it’s not actually remote. He got butthurt when I told him not to waste my time with this bait and switch shit, then told me I’m really limiting my ability to take good opportunities by being inflexible. I told him if the job risks the health and life of the person who’s most important to me in the world then it is by definition a dogshit opportunity, and he can go fuck himself, then hung up.
Unlimited death upon plague-rat employers who forcibly infect employees for “cOmPaNy cUlTuRE”. Their culture is disease.
This is what has kept me unemployed for almost two years. I’ve been a software dev for almost 15 years and I can’t get hired now because I must love the office, worship the office, schmooze at the office. No. Fuck the office. We did it before and we can keep doing it.
Fun story, pre-Covid I tried to be remote only like some of my other coworkers because of my medical needs which are much better managed at home and I was told no. then a year later Covid happened and we all went remote anyway. Almost like we don’t actually need to be in an office to do stupid fucking office jobs!! Wow!!!
wtf that’s terrible! Fuck these ghoulish employers. And 15 years of experience is a lot of talent and skill for them to throw away just because you don’t want to go along with their evil and stupid policies.
This is one of my big fears, that I’ll end up “unemployable”. Howhave you managed to get by that long? Unemployment caps out at 18 months, at least where I am.
I have been far more productive remote than I ever was in the office. Getting to and from the office and dealing with the sensory and social hell of it drained me to the point where most of my capacity to work was wasted on their inane in-office rules and shit that had nothing to do with, well, doing the work.
There was absolutely nothing more productive about being in office before the pandemic started, and now that we’re in a prolonged pandemic office-work is even more unproductive than before!
Bosses: Oh , we want you to have face to face conversations with coworkers! Reality: It’s going to be at most face to mask because if I have to be in office then I have to be in a respirator. And I’m going to be keeping my distance from the unmasked plague rats, and if they come in sick like they often do I’ll be cursing at them and telling them to go die in a fire. You want to see my face? Then let me video call in from the safety of home. You want me to be cool with coworkers coming in sick? Then let me work from the safety of home where I don’t have to protect myself from their psychotic desire to assault everyone around them by spreading the fucking plague.
Bosses: We want you to be able to spend more time working away from distractions. Reality: At home, anytime I need a sip of water or a snack, I can just drink or eat. At the office, I would have to go outside anytime I needed to eat or drink. Even if that means leaving a meeting. Oh and of course I’m not clocking out for that “break” because it only takes so long because they demanded in-office presence. Depending on the office size the round trip may take 10 minutes. And sometimes after drinking, I need to drink again quickly – especially if I’ve been delaying hydrating because I’ve been in a mask indoors for hours – so it might be a cycle of very frequent disruptions. I’m sure they’d quickly get pissed and try to hold disciplinary action for doing what they forced me to do.
Fuck them. Office-pilled management is evil and I hope they all die horribly.
Howhave you managed to get by that long? Unemployment caps out at 18 months, at least where I am.
I had a nice savings built up that lasted us about 6 months or so and then unemployment capped for me at 6 months as well, but since then my wife was lucky enough to get a min wage job to cover us; she assured me it’s no trouble and that she’s just repaying me working and supporting us for years on my own but I still feel pretty rotten about it often because I was just sitting at home safely and she’s in crowds of hundreds of people coming and going daily as the only one masking.
We got really, really lucky and found a rent-controlled apartment with a roommate who is just as serious as us about Covid thanks to my connections in our city’s Covid activism Discord, which was a genuine miracle with the timing. I’m not sure what else we would have done otherwise. We have only been surviving, not anywhere near what we had prior to the RTO mandates starting around 22-23, and I am very bitter about it. I’m already at a disadvantage for being a woman in tech, and this shit definitely doesn’t help. I don’t need to be in a building full of sick assholes who will kill me because I’m immunocompromised; guess what else employers discriminate against?
So I agree, I hope they all leave this earth violently. If they keep this up maybe I’ll get my wish.
“COVID is over, anon! You don’t need to wear that silly mask anymore!”
Did Marx or Lenin write anything about a certain stage of imperialism where the imperial core reimports some of its imperialist violence on its own populace?
Foucault’s Boomerang
It’s weird to see regular customers at my workplace changing up their masking habits. Like if the news reports an upsurge or something, they’ll wear a mask, usually with their nose exposed. Like they just refuse to understand the initial premise of masking - that it was to protect others from you first.
It just pisses me off seeing customers in my field coming in for this completely unnecessary service, occasionally get concerned for their own health, and then put on a mask to protect themselves.
Like they just refuse to understand the initial premise of masking - that it was to protect others from you first.
Not only do they do it for half-assed reasons in the first place (“you do you, except you keep your sick away from me”), they half-ass it in action by wearing the most ineffectual masks that are not adequate to prevent aerial spread, and then they pull them under their chins to talk or eat and wear them under their noses all the time like you said! That last one is actually mind blowing to me, I will never, ever understand it. At that point I don’t even know what it’s for. Is it virtue signalling? To whom? No one wears masks anymore, and in lots of places they’ll sneer at you for it. So whatever reason they do it, if they do it and they can feel the air go in and out of their face holes when they breathe then certainly, certainly they know this isn’t doing what it’s supposed to be doing even a little bit, right…? Do they think at all?
Like at that point I’d almost prefer them to go maskless so I know they’re an asshole instead of just a confused asshole.
I work for a company that is contracted by a large corporation along with another company. The only place that has PPE in the area we work is my work room and I don’t even interact with as many people as most other people do. And it was PPE I ordered myself on top of that. Why none of the management in any of the other companies doesn’t order PPE for their employees is kind of mind boggling. I always tell people who pass by to get some gloves or masks that they can take a box since I have multiple and I have plenty stockpiled.
Fwiw I get my tests for 3.50 each from weshielddirect, which I found on linktr.ee/buymasks. It’s still yet another monthly expense but at least cheaper than at most brick and mortar stores.
that’s like 6-7x cheaper than retail in my area. or maybe 3x since those are packs of two.
A despicable number of institutions also pawned off their expiring tests (actual exended expiration date) on their employees, many/most of whom are now using expired rapid tests when they have symptoms or covid exposure and going “welp tests are all negative!” (I’ve seen it firsthand, my friend was given a box of tests sometime, I think this spring, by the school district they worked at, that all expired in fucking february)
