Was it because the guy was built like a rugby player?

One time I did a week long stint in the South of Scotland, a rather scenic and lovely region. It's a great place for a short holiday.

It ranks as one of the most stressful and unpleasant experiences of my life.

After a few days, I had enough to make some conclusions as to what the problem was with this pharmacy. The staff were a skeleton staff, as usual. I should remind my readers that I had not long qualified at the time, and the concept of being a pharmacist with a skeleton staff was still kind of new to me. Oh, the naïevety of youth.

The store manager, newly assigned, didn't get on with the mostly female staff. He was described as loud and boisterous. Did I find him that way? No, not particularly. He was a hard working guy and did his best to help dispense prescriptions.

He had never dispensed a prescription in his whole life.

Oh boy, things went downhill from here. The mistakes he kept making. His insistence that I do customer facing dispensing. One dispenser somehow developed a bitter hatred of me. Somehow that happened after only a few days and I was being treated like a turd she had unfortunately stepped on. After dispensing prescriptions she would abruptly slide or toss it over, stating "that's a check" before turning her back to me to chat with the other staff.

The very same dispenser had bundled dispensed medication for two completely different people together. With a busy workload, I overlooked this (it was intercepted before leaving the pharmacy).

My "lovely" line manager paid me a surprise visit on this same week, just in time to witness the massive backlog and see that very same incident happen. Guess who got chewed out and told he was worthless? Moi.

Why didn't she think about having a long talk with the manager? Maybe it's because she didn't want to confront a fellow member of the League of Evil. Or was it because the guy was built like a rugby player?

The story didn't end here. Oh, no. It gets better. The free steak dinners and comfy hotel room didn't make up for this nonsense, but things got a little more...interesting. Next day, rugby player asked me if I enjoyed my dinner. As the conversation progressed, I realised he was keeping tabs on what I ate, which room I stayed, and what time I entered and left the hotel. All thanks to the people at reception. Needless to say, I won't be going back.