Hall of Shame

“Did you see this?” I said, smiling and waving the newspaper clipping at Kathryn, my part-time staff pharmacist. “Another item for our Hall of Shame!”

I think it’s called ‘Gallows Humor.” It’s common in the workplace. Making light of something that’s, well... more pathetic or depressing than funny.

“Yes, I think I saw that.” said Kathryn, looking at the newspaper report of a stabbing that took place a few days previously in a nearby town, “But I didn’t think he was one of ours. Name didn’t ring a bell.”

“Yeah, he used to come in here once a week like clockwork to get his pain medicine filled. The doc tapered him off in December, and I haven’t seen him since. He used to show up first thing in the morning, which is probably why you don’t remember him.” I explained. “He seemed friendly and good-humored. But I guess throw in some booze, a woman, a rival, and a knife, and things can go dreadfully wrong...”

Kathryn and I have been working together in the pharmacy since it opened in 1999. She was manager then. Since her illness I took over as manager and she went to part-time. We have a sort of competition going on as to who can spot news articles or police blotter blurbs spotlighting a patient of ours who is up to no good.

We’ve joked that we should get a Hall of Shame scrap book to paste the clippings into, and request that the perps autograph them if they show up in our pharmacy again. We’ve only gone so far as to temporarily pin the reports up in an out-of-the-way place.