This happened fairly recently - in February or March, before we were recommended to wear face masks. Sadly, it was a complete classic case: short, middle-aged white woman, built like a small tank, the exact hair you’d imagine - grayish blond, cut sweeping up in the back, bangs, the whole nine yards. She had her hands on her hips and was giving the counter person total hell. The situation was our local pharmacy, family-owned, has been in the area for several decades, has phone issues. There have been a couple of days I’ve tried to call them and have had to call back because their system was just down. All of us who work a desk job knows exactly what that is - it’s a tech situation, a line worker does not have access to, nor can in any way work with the situation, they just have to endure and hope the IT people, either in shop, local or remote, can get it fixed as soon as possible. I waited a few hours and called again and got through.

That wasn’t good enough for the karen, ivanka or battle-axe, though. She was drilling the poor, part-time, college-aged counter woman mercilessly about having her time wasted because she couldn’t call and had to actually come to the pharmacy to request her prescription in person. She even said, “I need to talk to someone who can explain why this happened!” Now, realize, the phones were working at the time of the encounter - I’d called before leaving work, so she was searching for someone in-store to explain something they had no idea of, AFTER it was resolved.

The next victim was a counter person with more years of experience who tried to explain that there was an issue with their system earlier in the day, but that their IT vendor had taken care of the problem. I had my refills by that time and headed for the door as I heard the myrmidon telling the women at the counter “it wasn’t fair I couldn’t call to get my refill.” I totally eye-rolled - all she had to do was try the phone later in the day to take care of that completely trivial first-world problem.

I’d been chuckling the last few months reading karen stories on Facebook. I never imagined I’d experience it in that pharmacy (they really do have the nicest people around working there) for something (to me) as stone-cold stupid as the issue the karen was bringing to the counter.