Summer

The kids are on summer break until August 11. Lots of things going on. I've been reduced to 75% time at work due to funding shortages. I've been considering getting licensed for in-home day care, but haven't totally made up my mind yet. I like the idea of working at home and I'm pretty good with kids, but I don't like the lack of flexibility in scheduling. Also, I know it's going to be a lot more work. When I think about it, I imagine that I would enjoy working with children and seeing them grow and learn over time. I think I have a lot to offer, being the good mom that I am :-). I have a lot of ideas on curriculum and activities and feel pretty pumped when I think about it, so it's definitely an option, especially since I just can't see myself starting a new low paying desk job. I mean, I'll do it if it comes down to that, but I'd rather do something that will allow me to work for myself. Tong is in the beginning stages of starting a landscaping business. He and his brother already do our lawn plus two of our neighbors', so he figured why not turn it into a business! By the way, he is totally supportive of the in-home daycare thing. That's the first time he's ever been excited and supportive about something (career wise) I wanted to do. We're planning a special vacation for just the two of us to celebrate our 10th anniversary, which sounds CRAZY!!!! It really doesn't feel like it has been that long at all. Ok, this might sound corney and cliche, but it's amazing that after 10 years, you can be more in love with your spouse than when you first met. Maybe, not in that "crazy in love" way, but to still feel completely in love on whole new level that only time and maturity will ever allow you to feel, where you totally accept each other for who he or she is and feel 100% content with your marraige and you're not wishing for anything more is just awsome. That's really what we have. I could write a book to tell you how great our relationship is, but that would be wavering on annoying, so I'll leave it at this, but to say it simply....what we have is pretty wonderful!!! I always think other couples are lucky if they have even a fraction of what we have. (I admit, that sounds really snooty and narrow minded, as if the world isn't vast enough for others to have it as good, or better than we do, but that just goes to show how happy I am). We're not perfect and our lives aren't perfect, but I think we've reached heights in a relationship/marraige that most people never get to, and that after only 10 short years! Needless to say, I am looking forward to the years to come. Back to our vacation, I think it's going to be a simple one, not too far away. We're thinking Napa. To totally change the subject, we just visited Tong's grandma in the hospital today. She's very sick and we were told that the doctors don't expect to release her and that it's just a matter of time at this point before she passes. Tong went back to the hospital late tonight. He's there now actually. (Aside: funny thing is he called to ask for her room number and I guess he was talking to the receptionist at the same time cause I heard him telling her to look up granny by "Apoo." He was even saying it all slowly and trying to enunciate, like "A - Pooh" I had to tell him, "No, that's not her name! You just call her that cause it means "grandma" in Chinese!!" Ha ha ha!

Bad Customer Service

It's been a week since my bad customer service experience and I'm pretty much over it now, so I probably will not portray the situation with as much passion as I actually had when it happened. Anyway, as I mentioned previously, Brody was given a prescription for 3 medicines last Monday so right after we left the urgent care center I dropped off his scripts at the local grocery store pharmacy, which opens from 9 to 9. The pharm tech told me it would be about 20 minutes and asked if I would be shopping in the store. I said no and repeated the time frame back to him just to be sure. He confirmed with a nod. This put us at 8:40 for our pick up time, but I knew I had until 9 (closing time) to pick it up, and since it's literally 2 minutes away from the house, I took Brody home to get us both dinner. Well, I got back to the store right on the dot at 9:00...possibly even a minute before because later on we compared my cell phone time to a keypad in the store and mine actually read 1 minute faster... anyway, I rushed to the pharmacy, but all the lights were already shut off and no one was in sight. I quickly circled the store to find an available employee to go check if someone was still back there. As I walked past the isles I checked my phone and it read 9:01, so I found it odd that the pharmacy was completely shut down, and thought it unrealistic that all that was done in one minute or less. I finally found a young fellow who looked like he was doing a price check and told him he needed to get someone in pharmacy for me because I have some meds to pick up. He said, "Well, they close at 9 so you have 4 minutes...hurry." I guess he didn't get what I was saying, so I explained that my time read 9:01 and they're already all gone. He proceeded to apologize in a "sorry, but you're SOL" way, so I told him he needed to go and talk to his manager about it right now because I think they closed early. I went and waited for him by the pharmacy and after about 2 minutes he came back and said that there was nothing they could do as they are not authorized to disperse the meds themselves....duh, that wasn't what I was asking them to do, so of course I asked to speak to this "manager." He told me that I could find him at check stand 5. I asked him, "you mean he's checking people out?" to which the answer was "yes." I walked to the front and found Cordell in the middle of ringing up a customer. I said to him, "Cordell, I was told to come and talk to you. You need to call the pharmacist right now and get her back in the store because she apparently closed up early and I need to pick up my medicine." He told me he would be with me after he finished checking out the customer. They couldn't seem to understand that time was of the essence here, but I remained patient. However, after Cordell finished checking out the customer, he started on the next person, so I jumped in and asked, "you mean you have to check out this entire line before you can talk to me?" He said yes as there was no one else in the store who could check people out. I couldn't believe what I was hearing so I had to ask, "there's no one, NO ONE in the WHOLE store who could check these people out?" At this point, the pharmacy tech walked up to the counter because he just happened to still be shopping in the store and heard Cordell's earlier page for pharmacy to call him. So as soon as I saw the tech, I told him, "you guys closed early, I need my medication." He explained that even he couldn't go back there without the pharmacist present, and tried to defend himself by saying that he paged me over the intercom 3 times. I told him that I stated very specifically earlier I wasn't going to do any shopping in the store. All he kept saying was, "I paged you" and "Well, I told you 20 mintues." I was livid to even hear those words come out of his mouth so I shot back, "I don't care that you told me 20 minutes, I had until 9 to pick it up, but you made the mistake of closing early AND I don't care that you paged me 3 times, I told you I wasn't going be shopping, so that is irrelevant and I don't want to hear you say that again!" Just then I realized he had a grocery bag in his hand and before I could help it I blurted out, "Well, you obviously had time to close up and go shopping didn't you?!" By the way, Cordell had pulled us off to the side and was part of this conversation, so I looked at him and said, "you need to call her (the pharmacist) because if she's on the road, the longer we stand here and argue about it the less likely she is to turn around." Again, he said it would have to wait until he checked out his entire line (people were still waiting there through all of this). Oh, but lo and behold, someone came and started checking out his line. Anyway, it turned out they only had a home number for this lady and since she lives about 30 minutes away, she obviosly hadn't gotten home yet so it went to her answering machine. I asked the pharm tech if he took the time to page me 3 times, why didn't he just call me. They claimed that it is not their policy to call customers to pick up meds, which is fine, but if you're going to do something outside of your normal procedures, like close early, aren't you obligated to notify your customers? I know they have our numbers on file because Tong and Jr have gotten scripts filled there before, and quite recently at that. In the end there was nothing they could do since they didn't have a cell number for this woman, but I felt like they dropped the ball on their customer service because they were so quick to just throw up their hands, like they didn't even want to try and help me. I had to ask them to place the phone calls. Also, the whole time the tech kept swearing up and down that they stayed 'til 9, so I told them I wanted to see their punch out cards, but conveniently no one in the store had access to that info and if I wanted to see them I would have to ask the store director the next day. I was most annoyed at the idiot tech who kept trying to give me dumb suggestions like, "oh, you could go to a 24 hour clinic and have a doctor write you another script, maybe they'll just do it without making you go through the whole process of being screened if you show them the top half of your original precsription." I don't think I even need to go into the details of how unrealistic and stupid that suggestion was. On top of all this, the idiot told me that my insurance didn't work. I told him it worked fine at urgent care just earlier and it has worked fine for a year now, and it worked fine for my other son who was hospitalized just a few weeks ago on the same insurance plan. So he tried to say he couldn't find Brody on the plan, but then changed it to, "well, he's on the plan, but not covered for prescriptions." He obviously was just talking out of his ass here, as if he was just making sh*t up as he went along or something. He said what looked odd was that the insurance was based out of UT, I said, "yeah, it is, that's where the corporate office of the employer is located." Well, he then said it's probably one that they need to place a call for....Hello!!! Then why did't you do it??!! Isn't that an automatic procedure? I guess not for these "extra mile go-ers," uh, uh, instead they automatically took the route of filling the script as a cash paying client! Which means if I had gotten there when it was ready at 8:40, we would've had to go into a long conversation about how they're not doing their job right and needed to figure it out. In the end we went home and the next morning when I returned, there was a whole new staff, and they did have a hard time tracing the insurance, but they were very thorough and were able to figure it out and everything went through fine. I had a conversation about this situation with the store director and associate director and they apologized and agreed that the closing timeline didn't make sense to them either and admitted that they really dropped the ball for closing early and that they will reiterate the rules regarding pharmacy hours to the pharmacist in question. I told them I didn't appreciate being forced to take a chance on my son because if he happened to be hit with another bout of tightening airways in the middle of the night we would've had to take him to the ER, but we were fortunate that wasn't the case.

Why so many doctors visits?

I just noticed that many of my entries are about my kids going to the doctors...I'll be back later to write about a really bad customer service issue. Also, I added a new song to my list (see below my profile) called The Last Thing On Your Mind. It's another Old Navy song. Take a listen.

I-5

It took me 2.5 hours to get home from work on Monday (usually a 20 minute drive) due to the closure of I-5. It was probably one of the worst driving experiences I've ever had. I started needing to p** like 30 minutes into my drive, but I kept thinking "it shouldn't be too much longer" so I kept holding it and ended up holding it for 2 hours! On top of that, I was on the road so long my gas light came about 2 miles from home. Well, when I finally got home I had to take Brody to the urgent care center because he started showing signs of croup Sunday night, but I thought he just had an allergic reaction to something he ate and figured it would just filter through with time. I gave him a couple puffs from an inhaler we had on hand from a previous croup incident and it helped him sleep that night, but when the difficult breathing was still there Monday evening I just had to bring him in. The nurse measured his oxygen level at 100%, so I knew we wouldn't have to go to the ER as we did the last two times he had croup. He received a breathing treatment and we were sent home with some prescriptions.