Broken Processes

Sometimes the best processes just don’t work…typically because of human error.  When I returned my rental car today, they told me that it wasn’t my car.  Apparently, I had somehow left the lot with the wrong car.  Which means they parked the car in the wrong spot or told me the wrong spot to go to.  On the way off the lot, they checked my paperwork across the barcode so I don’t see how that happens.

That made me think about an incident the other day at my pharmacy.  When I was tracking down my paper receipts for my old prescriptions, I went to my pharmacy and asked for a prescription history.  The pharmacy technician printed out all my prescriptions from the past 18 months after asking my name.  But, he never checked my identification.  I am not sure, but that seemed a little too easy especially since it was a tech at a chain pharmacy that had never seen me before and where I hadn’t been for months.  Given privacy issues, that can’t be the official process.