Around two weeks ago, mid-consultation, there was a creeping awareness that all was not well outside the consulting room. Through the door came a muffled sequence of *crash* “Buggrit!” *clunk* “Garn ye barstid!” *crash* “Buggrit!!” and so forth. At the end of the consultation (some minutes of crash-buggrits later) the source of the disturbance became apparent. An elderly gentleman in an electric scooter had siucceded in wedging himself in the corner where the corridor to our consulting rooms bends trough 90 degrees.
It was a truly marvelous contraption. In the eighties it wouldn’t have been surprising to see such a machine festooned with wing mirrors and its owner in the very latest fur trimmed parka. The only problem was its wheelbase being a good six inches too long to safely negotiate the Ambridge Surgery hair-pin.
Regardless of this fact, and in the dogged determination typical of the generation that survived Dunkirk and the Blitz, the operator of this magnificent conveyance had been battering it back and forth against the apex of the corner in the hope of forcing a passage. And behind him was a queue of vaguely amused looking patients politely waiting for him to get out of the way, rather than offering to lend him a hand!
In the end we had to back him up into main reception whilst we cleared a more accessible room for his consultation. At which point he stood up, gathered his stick from the back of the contraption, and walked apparently unimpeded into the newly cleared consultation room for his encounter with Dr Neighbour, who being a little further down the corridor, and perhaps a little deafer, had missed all of the intervening excitement and was a little surprised to be called into a different consulting room to see his patient.
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6 comments:
I thought at first the patient was Joe Grundy, but of course he'd have brought his pony and trap into the surgery.
My other thought was that your receptionist is amazingly good-natured in not having stopped it at once. Most of the doctors' receptionists I know are quite assertive.
I had such a good giggle at that. Oh the things you must see!
z-- It must be the Borsetshire accent. Makes all the old codgers sound the same after a while me old beauty me old darlin' ha ha ha haaar..... Interesting how Joe's Farmer's Lung seldom gets a mention these days though.
wendz-- happy to oblige, but as for the "things", on the whole I try not to look ;-)
z-- oh, sorry, forgot part II. The "hairpin" is some distance from reception so the poor girls had no chance of intercepting Sgr Fittipaldi Snr.
lolol I can just see it! (and hear it!)
sooz-- he was back again on Friday *crash- buggrit!*
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