Terms Governing Pharmacy Stock Calling
The pharmacy website says the item is available. The call is still being made.
Preliminary Findings: Terms Governing Pharmacy Stock Calling Submitted in Advance of Final Review
The Practice
Someone calls several pharmacies for the same item because online stock indicators no longer feel trustworthy. This is not irrational. The online stock indicator has been wrong before. The call is a check against a system that has demonstrated imprecision.
Finding One
The online stock indicator is no longer trusted because one time it was wrong, and that one time is more memorable than the several times it was right. This is how trust works and also how a three-minute phone call becomes a forty-five-minute process involving five pharmacies in two neighborhoods.
Finding Two
One successful use of pharmacy stock calling is remembered more clearly than the many uses that produced the same result as the website would have. The remembered success justifies adding the calling behavior to future errands before any problem appears.
Finding Three
The plan becomes so stable that removing pharmacy stock calling would require a decision about whether stopping calls introduces risk at a time when a question about availability is never just a question about availability. The calls continue.
The Governing Rule
An inconvenient ritual becomes official when stopping it would require a new decision. Nobody made a decision to call the pharmacies. Nobody made a decision to keep calling them. The practice accumulated authority the way practices accumulate authority: through repetition and the absence of a formal challenge.
Any pharmacy stock calling performed twice may not be removed merely because the original problem has disappeared. The disappearance of a problem is not evidence that the practice preventing it is no longer needed. It is, in practice, evidence for the opposite.
The Contradiction
The checking seeks certainty in a situation where certainty expires. The call to the pharmacy establishes availability at the moment of the call and only at the moment of the call. By the time the person arrives, conditions may have changed. A second call is sometimes made on the way.