RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31858, 10 December 1968, Page 26

RANDOM REMINDER

FORTY WINKS

It had been a very busy morning in the dentist’s rooms and work went on rather beyond the usual hour for the lunch break. But finally, the last of the morning patients had been discharged with encouraging words, and the dentist told the nurse to go off for her well-earned break.

He thought about lunch for himself, and was as far as putting on his coat when he decided a short rest would be of more benefit to mind and body than a hasty snack. So he strewed his considerable frame in his dental chair

and within seconds was deep in sleep. At 2.30 p.m. the first Of the afternoon patients arrived, rang the bell, and sat in the waiting room. The dentist slept.

At 3 p.m. the second of the afternoon patients arrived, rang the bell, sat in the waiting room, and began to talk to the 2.30 patient. The dentist slept on. About 3.15 p.m. the two patients, overcoming their normal dental-room inhibitions, opened the door and saw him there. Both, as it happened, had not long before seen a television play in which a harassed dentist had

taken his life with gas in his own chair. They rushed off to bring in the nurse from a doctor’s rooms nearby. And the three of them were there when the dental nurse came back, to hear the plaintive cries of something dreadful having happened, etc.

The dental nurse was not without a proper sense of drama. She escorted the doctor’s nurse, and the two patients, into the room and arranged them in a suitably-disposed group, complete with reproachful looks, before she began to shake the dentist’s shoulder . . .