Impractical Jokes Read Free

seen anything,’ said Roger. My dad backed him up.
    â€˜We’ve been too flat out with customers.’

    After graduating, Dad bought a small pharmacy in partnership with Peter, another pharmacist he had met in the final year of college. The men didn’t know each other that well. In fact, all they really knew of each other was that they were both pharmacists and both had exactly half the money needed to go into business with the other.
    The partnership began well for Peter and Dad. The novelty of a new colleague and the pride of owning their own business made the first few days exciting and fun. This initial momentum was helped along by a procession of eccentric local customers who provided no end of entertainment. There was old Mrs Stevens who never bought a thing but would come in at eleven-thirty on the dot to sit down and have a rest on her way to bingo. Then there was Mr Pappas, perpetually complaining about the ‘blardy garment’, but when pushed for specifics was unable to name which party or level of ‘blardy garment’ he was talking about. And then there was the dynamic duo of Mrs Mackilroy and her mature-aged, developmentally-challenged son, Maurice. She had a short-term memory that would make goldfish look gifted, while he found it infinitely funny that his mum was utterly incapable of getting Dad’s name right.
    â€˜Thank you, Mr Partridge.’
    â€˜Hehehehehe.’
    â€˜Maurice. Don’t laugh at Mr Pilkington. It’s very rude.’
    â€˜Hehehehe. It’s not Pilkington, Mum. It’s Pickering.’
    â€˜Don’t be so ridiculous, Maurice. I’m terribly sorry, Mr Picknelli. He’s a little touched, you see.’
    â€˜That’s quite all right, Mrs Mackilroy. I totally understand.’
    â€˜That’s very understanding of you, Mr Pettingill.’
    â€˜It’s Pickering, Mum. Hehehehe.’
    â€˜That’s it, Maurice, I’m taking you home. I’m so sorry, Mr Pankhurst.’
    â€˜That’s quite all right, Mrs Mackilroy.’
    And with that they would make their exit. The last thing Dad would hear as Mrs Mackilroy ushered Maurice out the door was his name, followed by a high pitched giggle fading into the distance.
    But after four days of the theatre company of Stevens, Pappas, Mackilroy and Son (with a dozen or so supporting cast members) staging the same play in his small pharmacy, Dad became a little bored with the shop’s predictable cadence. He decided he needed to spice things up a bit.
    At the time of this story, which was the seventies, two important things were true of pharmacies. First, all pregnancy tests were performed by pharmacists. You would submit a small jar of urine and the chemist would send it away to a lab. Some time later, the jar would come back and the pharmacist had the unenviable job of telling you if you were pregnant or not. I say unenviable because this is a piece of information with only a fifty per cent chance of being what the recipient wants to hear. While it’s possible that you are pregnant and want to be or aren’t pregnant and don’t want to be, it is equally possible that you are pregnant and don’t want to be or not pregnant but wanting to be. There are very few other pieces of information in the world that have such binary success rates—a doctor telling someone they are fit to serve in the army comes to mind; as does an occupational advisor telling someone they are well-suited to a career as a rodeo clown.
    The second important quirk of 1970s pharmacies was that they sold two flavours of the effervescent vitamin supplement and hangover mainstay Berocca. They were the highly popular red flavour and the distinctly less popular tropical flavour. People would debate the tropical flavour’s poor sales for years—some put its failure down to insufficient marketing; others would blame its taste. But most would agree that it wasn’t helped by the