Work woes

The first week after returning from vacation is always so miserable that I regret taking the vacation at all. That was especially true this time, because my schedule fell in such a way that not only was that week very busy, I was also doing off-site work almost every day. This left me precious few hours to actually catch up on back-logged work. Oh, and Walgreens nationwide crashed on Monday and the system stayed down or sporadically faulty through Friday. The worst scenario to come back to!
On both Monday and Friday, I had off-site flu clinics that were exhausting. They were at a college campus downtown, a little less than half a mile away, and since there is no parking nearby, I walked from my store - lugging a cooler full of ice and vaccines, a giant sharps container, my multiple boxes of syringes, alcohol pads, bandaids, pens, cotton balls, immunization cards, epinephrine pens, and of course - hundreds of pages of paperwork. On Monday, I pretty much had to leave for the clinic the minute I got to the store, which was a stressful way to return from vacation; then the clinic itself was incredibly busy. In less than two and a half hours, I gave 104 shots - that's about a minute and twenty-something seconds per shot. That's the entire encounter: the paperwork, the screening, the shot, the immunization record. It was ridiculous. I was hoping it wouldn't repeat on Friday, but when I arrived about 15 minutes early to set up, there were already 48 students waiting. I know it was 48, because they had organized and implemented their own numbering system! It was like the dmv in there!
I don't have the final count for Friday, because of course, our computers went down, but it felt as busy as Monday, or more so.
What else was going on this week?
- A 6-hour certification test on Wednesday
- An off-site training on Tuesday (in the middle of the day - I had to return to work for one stupid hour after the training, much to my annoyance)
- Volunteering for an HIV community event on Saturday.
- Fielding a billion complaints from while I was gone: my pharmacist who covered my vacation shifts opened the store late THREE TIMES.
- A frantic hour during my test hunting down the teacher for a class I coordinate at a local AIDS service organization; she is usually dependable yet totally forgot this time.
- Talking to one of my big bosses about 18 times about a 340B agreement I'm trying to finagle. And a number of other projects he won't leave me alone about.

Now I'm heading back into work Monday morning absolutely not caught up from vacation a full week later! And the schedule only gets worse! I'm thinking my poor staff deserve lunch on Monday after their rough week, too.