So off I go to pharmacy A where they say yes sir, certainly sir, we got your prescription through yesterday and we made it up last night. Thinking of some poor shop assistant toiling away on minimum wage, I hope they meant early evening. Just hang on while we get it out for you.
Maybe 15 minutes later they were still getting it out for me and I suspect that in the end they gave up and made it up again. The lady behind me was on the same case, in her case for stuff for diabetes which she had asked for about 10 days previously, and I wondered how much storage space this not very big pharmacy had for all the ladies like her. As it turned out, she got out before me, having waited for around 10 minutes - 10 minutes being about how long you walked around the block for in the olden days when you walked the prescription in yourself. No doubt it will all settle down and the new service will indeed come to serve.
While I waited for the IT pill distribution system to kick in, to distribute, I pondered about how IT might better support consumption - assuming for these purposes that I can be relied on to be near my telephone at all times. The IT pill consumption system.
First thought was that I could tell Cortana (the helpful person who lives inside my telephone) about needing to take pills each morning and evening and could she remind me please. This would take just a few seconds to set up. Second thought was that this would be rather tiresome since I usually remembered without a reminder, but might not remember and certainly would not want to bother to cancel the reminder on each occasion.
Third thought was that I needed to internet enable the little plastic box I have between the supply in the drawer and me. A little plastic box holding seven smaller boxes, one for each day, and with each smaller box having two compartments, one for morning and one for evening. (As one gets older there are more elaborate versions with more compartments, catering for more complex states of the world). The little plastic box that I use cost a couple of pounds or so from Boots and has served very well, with my only rarely missing a dose, usually much less often than once a month.
But one could do better, Firstly, rich & ostentatious people, would like something more flashy than a little plastic box. Maybe the Mick Jaggers, the Damien Hirsts and other celebrities of that sort would like to have a gold pill box, encrusted with diamonds and sapphires. Perhaps I should pop into Aspreys to make sure that they have such things. Secondly, coming back to the third thought, the box should be internet enabled.
It would know when each compartment should be emptied and whether it had been emptied. After a suitable interval it could send a message to Cortana who could make my telephone ring or vibrate or something. And she would do that every so many minutes until the compartment said that it had been emptied.
The next level would not be to bother with the little plastic box at all, rather to have a rather grander contraption simply dispense the pills needed at any particular time, directly from the main supply, into a small, jewelled container. This container would then start to send out alerts if it was not emptied at about the right time. This would eliminate the weekly ritual of box filling. But would have the disadvantage of not being so portable. Need to think a bit more about that side of things.
And then, from time to time, it could send an email to the surgery requesting further supplies. And so on and so forth.
An even further level would be pills that were IT enabled. Each pill would include a microchip which could tell the fat controller when it had been ingested and by whom. This would provide a useful extra check that a pill removed from my pill container had in fact been consumed by me.
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