World...spinning....Must...re-establish...grip....

The current Big Project at The Store is a major remodeling project. It seems that the Powers-That-Be decided a while back that The Pharmacy at The Store just wasn't big enough, and quite frankly, they're one hundred percent right, since the current Pharmacy at The Store is about the size of my first dorm room at college, and yet there are always at least eight people working back there, and often more, and that's just the people. Factor in all the shelving for all the drugs, and the cabinets for packaging, and the computers, and the records they have to keep on hand, and whatever other paraphernalia are required for practicing the fine art of Apothecary, and my amazement mounts that the people actually working in our Pharmacy are about the nicest people in the entire Store.

(I shudder to think what would happen if we put, say, the fellows from the Meat Department in there. I love the Meat guys, but these are the people who listen to Van Halen on a boom box while cutting meat with big knives, or even a band-saw. The results would not be pretty.)

So, this week the Pharmacy people have been relocated to a Temporary Pharmacy (involving a temporary Customer Service area and a double-wide trailer set up immediately outside the Store's side door), where they will remain for two months while their old Pharmacy is rebuilt into a Shiny, New, Improved Super-Duper Pharmacy.

Now, we didn't just dump this change onto the customers with no warning whatsoever. We have posted signs all over the store about the impending remodel, starting more than two months ago. And now that the remodel is actually in progress, we have hung additional signage from the ceiling, complete with Big Green Arrows, such that anyone entering The Store should be able to figure out where the Temporary Pharmacy is in lieu of the old one that is now being refitted with new warp engines and the like.

Or so you'd think.

Instead, I have been subjected to a steady stream of people who walk in, note the huge plywood barrier enclosing the old pharmacy, and then in panicked voice grab the nearest convenient person wearing The Store's logo on their shirt (in many cases, me), and demanding in a mixture of terror and rage, "Where is the Pharmacy?! Why have we closed the Pharmacy?!" And this despite the fact that the Temporary Pharmacy is literally thirty feet from the Old Pharmacy; the Temporary Pharmacy can be seen from the Old Pharmacy; the plywood enclosure on the Old Pharmacy has one of the afore mentioned Big Greek Arrows reading "Pharmacy Thataway" bolted directly to it; and the Temporary Pharmacy has a giant sign hanging directly above it reading, you guessed it, PHARMACY.

At least once I've had the temptation to get this quizzical look on my face and say something like, "Pharmacy? No, we don't have one of those. But we do have an Apothecary. Maybe they can help!" Or maybe something along the lines of, "The Surgeon General has recently advised that all medications be taken in powder form, so you'll find your meds in the baking supplies aisle, next to the flour and confectioner's sugar." But no, I chicken out each and every time, because you quickly learn that the old canard about "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" is a bit of a misstatement, and that scorned women are like purring kittens next to an elderly person who needs to pick up their pills.