I know it’s fall when the Walgreen’s flu shot reminder arrives in my mail.
 
This time each year, I take my personalized, computerized paperwork and thirty bucks cash on the barrelhead to my neighborhood Walgreen’s. In minutes, the friendly staff pokes my arm and sends me on my way to a respiratory distress-free holiday season.
 
So I was surprised Friday when Annette the Pharmacy Intern asked for my insurance card.  “Flu shots are covered now?” I asked.
 
“It should be,” Annette said.
 
Yes, for the $525 a month I pay Blue Cross for individual coverage it probably should!
 
As Mike the Pharmacist prepared my vaccination, Annette scanned my card and learned that as far as Blue Cross was concerned, I was not only an“invalid group,” but also a “non-match recipient.”
 
For the next hour, I had a front row seat as the Walgreen’s pharmacy team delivered a textbook example of  grace and humor under conditions that would tax Mr. Rogers’ civility skills.
 
Annette dialed the double-secret snafu hotline, an 800 number given only to pharmacists.  After 20 minutes of scripted Socratic dialogue, the Voice on the Other End of the Helpline sent Annette to the 1-800 “customer service” number on my card.
 
“Did I do what?” Annette said —with a big grin—20 minutes later to the Voice on the Other End of the Helpline.  ”I talked to you guys. You sent me somewhere else and they sent me back here.  What do you mean ‘resubmit the claim? I’ve submitted it five times already. Call back in two or three days?  Is that what you want me to tell the patient who has been listening to this for an hour?”
 
Now deep into the Comedy Central Zone, the Voice on the Other End of the Helpline advised Annette to “Pick a different drug and run it through [the computer] again.”
 
Yes, I thought, that’s the ticket!  Run me through as a cancer patient!  Or AIDS! How about leprosy?  Let’s see if the Blue Cross computer will take that diagnosis in lieu of flu!  Inspired by the Good Humor men and women at Walgreen’s, I decided to throw a log onto the one-liner fire. “Maybe they’ll let you speak to the person who cashes my checks?” I asked.
 
They wouldn’t, but each and every Voice at the Other End of the Helpline did ask Annette if there was “anything else we can do for you today?”
 
It’s easy to make fun of those Voices at the Other End of the Helpline and a spoonful of smartmouth really does make a waste of time go down easier for a $525 a month premium payer and an overworked, underpaid pharmacy staff.   But those Voices are real people, and they deserve more from life than a mind-numbing, soul-destroying high-tech paper shuffling job that adds billions to the cost of health care and nothing to the nation’s health.
 
In the time it took to play out this improvisational comedy sketch, Mike and Annette could have vaccinated the entire zip code.   It’s something for Gov.Scott to think about while paying his $30 a month taxpayer-subsidized insurance premium.
 
Meanwhile, all of us who are held hostage each day to the malevolent machinery of modern life can take heart knowing that comic relief might be as close as the neighborhood drug store.

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Florence Snyder is a corporate and First Amendment lawyer. Contact her at lawyerflo@gmail.com. If you do contact her, please find out if she ever actually got the flu shot.

(Photo credit: Amber Orenstein)