Here’s To Life In The Age Of Invisibility

by Kevin Burton

   The same little girl said a sunshiny “hi” to me twice in the grocery store Tuesday. This was astounding to me, since I am invisible.

   You make your circuits in a smallish store and you may cross paths with the same people multiple times.

   I gave the girl the same cheery two syllable “he-low” both times. It’s the same hello I heard Jim White give on his all-night radio show on KMOX in, St Louis during the 80s. 

  What the girl’s grandmother said to me was “sorry, scuse me.” 

   Or, said at me? Can I say it that way? That may be bad grammar, but I’m communicating here, am I not?   

   It’s possible that I’m not literally invisible, but the world has begun to treat me that way. Actually, invisible is not the word. Is there a word for visible but not worthy of acknowledgement? Something you try to see through? Human smog?

   The houses, stores, fields, motor vehicles, pedestrians and other people places and things that lie between your point A and your point B on a given day, do you actually see them?

   I’m just making an observation, not pointing fingers.  I’m no better. In terms of human interaction, I am usually much closer to the grandmother than the little girl.  In fact, I couldn’t tell you anything about the two strangers other than the child was wearing some kind of bright clothing and the grandmother was wearing dark green.

   The child’s voice smiled at me, but I didn’t look up to see the actual face.

   A family joke (an oldie but a goodie) because I am legally blind but have some useful vision, is that I “see what I want to see.”

   Really, I don’t want to see much.  I was sent into the store for peanut butter. So I only had eyes for peanut butter and peanut M&Ms and pork chops and Alka Seltzer.  As for little girls and grandmothers, I’m just trying to make sure I don’t run them over with my cart. Blind man driving, be-beep.

   So I am an introvert, and without apology. But still, sometimes I think I am missing something good, charging through life with my head down.

   Here’s another age-of-invisibility thing: Before I went to the grocery store I went through a pharmacy drive through with my wife, picking up two of her meds. In the drive through, the pharmacist asked my wife to repeat herself several times, first name, date of birth. This was annoying.

   Much worse, when we got home we discovered this woman had given us the wrong medicine.  One order was correct, but for the second, she gave my wife somebody else’s meds.

   My wife calls of course to try to correct this and can’t get a human being to answer the phone.  Hang up I say, we have to go back there.

   We get to the store and ask for the store manager. The clerk gets on an intercom and says “Tammy (sp?) there is a guest here asking to see you.”

   In due time Tammy arrives and we explain what her employee has done. Manager Tammy is completely dead pan, unfazed and unsurprised. It was as if I had told her that somebody knocked over an endcap display.

   She showed no concern for us or anyone else who might ingest the wrong medicine by mistake, or for our inconvenience of having to return to the store.

   To her credit, she did take the order and fill it, giving my wife the correct medicine. But at the end of the day, she left us without so much as an apology.

   The store, the Walgreens pharmacy in Derby, Kansas, committed at least one HIPAA violation Tuesday, probably at least two and possibly more. The medicine bottles of course, have some of your personal information on them. We got somebody else’s which means chances are somebody else got ours.

   If you ran a pharmacy and your employee had just violated the HIPAA rights of your customer, would you not at least apologize to your customer?

   This manager, Tammy,  treated us like so much detritus, human debris, the sort of thing you have to deal with to get through your shift and get back to what you really care about. We were something less than invisible.

   People make mistakes. I make more mistakes before 9 a.m. than most people make all day. I get that. But I’m not sure that Walgreens bunch needs to be licensed to dispense medicine. We’ll make some calls, then let the state of Kansas decide.

   In the meantime, I am left with my own questioning. Is there perhaps, a message worth hearing, from a happy little girl, riding in a shopping cart, hanging with grandma?