Pills, Thrills and Methadone Spills 2: A Book Review

Community pharmacy can be a pretty lonely career at times. It can be a horrendously stressful and pressured environment to work in. It can also be hysterically funny, and those times often make the rest of it worthwhile. In a workplace that is ultimately centred around illness, the pinpricks of hilarity become all the more important.

Its good, then, that someone decided to make a book of all those funny moments that happen in the average pharmacy day. Its even better when they decide to do so twice. Enter the second instalment of Pills, Thrills and Methadone Spills by fellow anonymous pharmacist Mr Dispenser.

Those of us pharmacy types who use (for which read obsessively depend on) Twitter or who read any pharmacy magazines will no doubt be aware of Mr Dispenser, who is a regular day-brightener with his wit and humour. 

Partly constructed of tweets, part blog-anthology, this is a warm and good natured collection of anecdotes. All but the most curmudgeonly of pharmacists will find themselves laughing out loud, and there will certainly be many moments of recognition in there too. You find yourself thinking 'oh I've got one of those stories too'.

Its a nicely inclusive format, which I think in its own little way helps to address the isolation of the job.  If you look closely enough, you'll even find a couple of pearls of wisdom from yours truly, which is nice. Its like sitting in a pub with a big group of other pharmacists and having a good old chortle about the daft things you encounter everyday. You're left feeling much cheerier about your lot, and with a nice sociable glow. to a non-pharmacy eye, some parts may be slightly close to the bone, but I think that from within the profession its clear that it is meant affectionately.

There is, however, a bit of a disappointing #everydaysexism moment later on in the book in 'Gender Bender'. Given that I write this whilst an unfinished blog post about how harmful portrayals of women can be sits in my blogger account, this is me courteously reminding Mr Dispenser that all women do not merely discuss hair and nails and read Hello magazine, nor do they all coo over babies whilst men leer at sports cars and read Top Gear magazine (Which, by the way, I used to have a wardrobe full of. despite having no driving license). So less of the stereotyping, please, and we will all get along fine at this year's Pharmacy Show

Now lets address the font. Very attentive readers of this blog will know that there is one font that I consider to be an abomination against mankind. Comic sans  is not big, its not clever, and its certainly not jaunty. It doesn't make me think "ooh, a light-hearted and humourous piece of writing!", but rather makes me stabby. There's is nothing wrong with good old arial, and the writing in this book is funny and clever enough on its own without having to resort to comic bloody sans.

Hxxx

DISCLAIMER: This book isn't actually due out yet for 8 weeks or so and may be subject to font changes and editing. If this occurs, I'm going to leave this post as it is, as a testament and reminder of how I can occasionally have some influence. Also possibly because I will be too lazy to amend it.   

You can also find this post- and a whole variety of mine and many other lovely people's book reviews over at Backlight, my collaborative book review blog for busy people.