The Alliterative P-- Principle

Dear myself,

After all, who else is reading now since I haven’t posted in centuries? When I am killing time, one of my favorite activities is reading up on random blogs about people’s thoughts and such. Some are entertaining, others are sad, others are cleverly stupid and addicting like TMZ. But a common thread is that there sometimes seems to be an awkward silence at the end, as if the person just decided to quit with little explanation. Except the stuff with ads; those always seem to last forever like daytime soap operas! (a foreshadowing perhaps?)

In books we read, we expect a satisfying conclusion to a story: there is a beginning, middle and an end (otherwise, the book wouldn’t be published we should hope). But a blog is an organic, continuous thing written in real-time by people who cannot make their lives into solid beginnings, middles and ends.

For myself, I cannot make some grand statement that I was on sabbatical meditating on the deeper meaning of life. In truth, I was a bit depressed that I couldn’t get a foot into hospital pharmacy because of the experience Catch-22 (we won’t hire you without experience, and since you don’t have experience, you’ll never get any). Because I was raised in a household which had inordinately emphasized money, a big part of my self-worth is linked to the size of my bank accounts, which had been dwindling as of late. And as the dollars and sense [sic] faded, so did my fervor for everything else.

The solution: get a job, any job. As luck (or fate or destiny) would have it, when I found out that even staffing agencies (middlepeople* who get paid tens of thousands of dollars by employers to hire pharmacists) could only get me retail jobs, I began to apply for the dreaded things myself. Dreaded because I knew how bad a situation could be when you don’t have adequate support and are expected to fill hundreds of prescriptions a day, all the while people are yelling at you for something you can’t control. Then people sue you for misfilling (filling a prescription incorrectly) which is the ultimate kicker; it didn’t happen to me, but a friend of mine happened to dispense Nexium 40mg instead of 20mg which in the worst case scenario might have caused the guy to suffer some more severe placebo-like side effects.**

But if that’s the only gainful employment I can get, then so be it. I’m thankful for a college degree which pretty much guarantees a job; maybe not the most rewarding one, but certainly a stable and high paying one.

So I had sent a few interest requests to some of the better prospects. A central fill facility (assembly line work where you sit and verify all day, because they’re required to have warm bodies licensed by the Board of Pharmacy), which ultimately hired another pharmacist. And a 7-on 7-off overnight position, which had been unanswered for 2 weeks. Then I got an email on Sunday right after mass (believe in God much?) seeing if I was still interested. It was followed by a phone call the next day and an interview that same week. When it rains, it pours, as the cliché goes.

Fast forward a bit: Two weeks ago, I started my new job at the same work schedule, with a better computer system, a newly opened pharmacy, and probably most importantly with an $8/hr pay increase over my last job. Joking aside (though money is apparently dreadfully important to me), I’m just glad to be working again.
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So the title of this post, the ‘Alliterative P-- Principle'. What is the p--? I’ve taken a liking to how Hemingway’s books were censored with the first letter of the naughty word followed by an indeterminate dash representing the rest of the foulness, so I will flatter his censors with imitation. It’s a 5 letter word that little kids may use to describe their feline friends, and it also happens to be the first name of a Bond villainess.

After a quick Google search, I’m terribly surprised that the P-- Principle is not mentioned anywhere, not even on Urban Dictionary, which has several entries for ‘robocop’ as a perverse [post] coital act but not the p-- principle, a fundamental, unconscious driving force for human males***.

So the P-- Principle as simply defined is this: men choose to do the things which will give them the greatest benefit in the greatest frequency. This is more in depth than the pleasure principle in that it takes into account the probabilities of the ‘benefit’. Most guys would kill for a chance to ‘benefit’ women like Megan Fox, Emmanuelle Vaugier, or that milkaholic Lindsay in her pre-alcohol, pre-druggie days, but it’s simply not going to happen. So instead of stalking impossible marks, most sane men go after (and expend resources on) those of the opposite sex who are more within their league.

In mathematical terms (because I’m a dork), the estimated probability of an event multiplied by the perceived benefit of the event equals the weighted benefit.

%Occurrence x perceived benefit = weighted benefit.

And most men (and women) will usually pursue the action with the greatest weighted benefit. I would argue that the sane always pursue the greatest weighted benefit; the changes in their decisions are due to the changes in their perceived probability of success and/or perceived benefit. Eg, when you fall in love and decide to propose, the perceived benefit of spending the rest of your life (or the next 5 years) with the same person eclipses the benefit of random fornication.

So what’s with all this nonsense? Well the P-- Principle applies to career decisions as well. Though I really like the reading and writing bit and find it terribly fulfilling (high perceived benefit), I don’t have faith that I can be successful or profitable at it in the long term (low probability of occurrence). Making large sums of money now as a pharmacist has a higher weighted benefit since paying off student loans is a b--. And I scratched the casing on my Gucci watch, so I have to get money to get it replaced.

In the three months of unpaid vacation, I never once seriously considered writing to be a viable primary income source because I knew I could make significantly more as a pharmacist and I knew I had a higher probability of finding solid, stable work as a pharmacist. ...though this could change in the future...

In short, the P-- Principle prevailed.

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*not trying to be PC, just thought ‘middlepeople’ was a funny word
**First off, why the hell would you prescribe the 20mg instead of the 40mg (a practical reason, not an academic theoretical one), when the side effects are minimal at best? As a reference, a majority of the other drugs in the same class only come in a single strength. Secondly, though you aim to not make any mistakes, this is as tame a mistake as it comes.
***And if the p-- were altered to another 5-letter word, then it would also apply for some human females, though the Prada Principle usually applies in more cases