Is unloved unwanted?

Thursday, 7th June 2012 12:39 - by Moosh

I digress to break the ‘technical’ momentum.... Starting out as a locum pharmacist after moving to a new city in which there was likely to be an already well-established flock of locums, at first, seemed like an impossible task for me, especially given that I lack people skills and have a habit of not saying all the right things in all the right places at ever the right time......being blunt is apparently not particularly welcome in most forms of sociability! So I asked myself, should I change myself in order to keep myself in active employment? Simply, the answer was ‘NO!’. So what was the next step? Obviously I needed to work so I had to see what opportunities were out there for locums. Now at the time the profession was still getting over the fallow year created after the pharmacy degree was extended to a 4 year programme, which meant there were still quite a few places not being taken by the established locums. Entertainingly enough, I really shouldn’t have been so overawed by the prospect of competing for work since a lot of placements I had were in stores which other pharmacists wouldn’t go near because they were deemed to be ‘busy’. Now I’m not afraid of hard work (which, after a few weeks, wasn’t actually that hard!) and for the sake of keeping a roof over my head I saw these stores as challenges so while they were very much unloved, they were by no means unwanted, if only by me. They do say ‘one man’s rubbish is another man’s treasure’.