Monday tends to be a bit slow at work. The giant backlog of prescriptions hasn't built up yet, so we tend to have time on our hands (as opposed to the rest of the week, which we spend running around like headless chickens with ADHD). Sometimes this leads to oddness. This afternoon I somehow found myself in the middle of a a free and frank discussion of various racial stereotypes as applied to penis size. (It may be worth pointing out that our workforce consists of one half-Texan Jew [me], one Kenyan Indian, one half-white-Salvation-Army- member/half Pakistani Muslim, one British West African, one Hong Kong Chinese and one lonely white Caucasian, so we can get away with this kind of stuff). Apparently Asian guys really do have statistically smaller penises, while there is a popular myth that black men have big ones. I knew none of this (it's not really my area). It was very educational. And a bit scary. And thank God no customers came in while our rather innocent pre-reg student was blithely informing us that he had eight feet. (He was referring to his shoe size, but given the context we had to be scraped off the ceiling and given oxygen).
We did eventually start trying to do some actual work, but it didn't last long, because we found a stack of blood glucose testing kits that had been withdrawn from stock and decided we needed to know our blood sugar levels. For Science.
They weren't your standard stab-your-finger-with-a-spring-loaded-needle kind, either, they were very sci-fi. They came with a little dart-gun thing about the size of a fat biro, with a sort of primitive vacuum chamber on the business end. You load the thing with a lancet, cock it, press it against your inner forearm so it forms a seal, and then fire it. The lancet pops out with a very satisfying *ping*, stabs you, and the vacuum sucks your blood out. You then have to get the blood into the test strip which sucks it into the bowels of a little machine which analyses it.
It's brilliant, but surprisingly tricky. We got on better once we gave up trying to read the instructions in Dutch and found the English version, but still. The machine told me I had invalid blood twice, and flatly refused to acknowledge that my second-in-command had any blood at all. The display just kept blinking APPLY BLOOD. MOAR BLOOD MY HUNGER IS NOT APPEASED. We managed it finally, but not until we'd each had enough goes that our arms were covered with what looked like tiny sucker marks from the vacuum seal. We looked like we'd been savaged by a tiny octopus.
Pause to note that it didn't hurt, we're slightly nonchalant about health and safety but we're not actually masochists.
And that is what goes on in the back while you're buying paracetamol and condoms. Someone should write a sitcom. Sort of Clerks meets Green Wing.
(PS - For the record, my blood glucose was 6.0, which is about what you'd expect given that I'd just eaten a bag of Minstrels).
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