MIAMI, Florida –
Joe Pruitt, a 74-year-old Miami resident, used to enjoy waiting in line for his prescriptions at the pharmacy every month. He considered this ritual of getting his Xanax, pain-killers, and Viagra as a pleasant experience, and he’d go home immediately to wash down his pills with a gin gimlet. He says that his trip to the pharmacy served as a comfort, to fill the empty void of his life as a retiree with kids who resent him and never call. All of that changed last month when a pharmacy employee did the ‘unthinkable.’
“That young whipper-snapper must have too many holes in her head from all those piercings. She told me that the doctor had not called in my prescription,” Pruitt said wringing his hands in anger. “Then she wouldn’t even check the bin for my bloody prescriptions, claiming she was ‘too busy’ and to come back later.”
Fuming and confused, Pruitt says he drove all the way home, up hill both ways, to call his doctor from his landline home phone. After waking from his regular afternoon nap, Pruitt says something ‘unbelievable’ happened.
“Around 5 pm, I went back to get my pills. The damn nine-to-fivers were rushing the pharmacy, and I had to wait in line for over thirty minutes,” said Pruitt. “That is when it came to me. A nice lady named Anna Smith, who was waiting in line to pick up an prescription enema for her son, was the first to hear of my new plan.”
“He was kind of making me uncomfortable,” Smith said, “and he was sort of mumbling to himself incoherently about robots and machines, and the ‘kids today.’ I was just hoping he wasn’t about to have a stroke.”
Although Smith says she was just scared listening to Pruitt talk, she should have listened a little closer, because Pruitt was describing an invention that may well revolutionize an entire industry.
“My idea is a machine that can help us all. I’ve invented an automatic, electronic pill dispenser. The pills are pre-filled by a doctor or whoever controls the meds these days – a politician, I guess – then all patients have to do is insert a card with their prescription on it. The machines reads it, and pills are dropped from inside. Kinda like a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup from a vending machine, or for us old-timers, a pack of smokes.”
When Pruitt was asked whether or not he minded that he would be destroying jobs in the pharmaceutical industry, he seemed to not really care about the welfare of the next generation.
“That pharmacist’s job was just to put little pills into a bottle, and she couldn’t even do that right. Now she will be out of a job because, and I’m glad for it. Who needs these young ankle-biters when you can have a perfectly good machine to do the same job, only more effectively? This will teach them young ‘uns to get between me and erections or my naps,” Pruitt said, cackling in a creepy old-man kind of way.
With Pruitt’s new fortune he plans to put thousands upon thousands of pierced and tattooed millenials out of their jobs, and he can’t wait start on his next big idea – creating robot replacements for Starbucks baristas.