Brian Manning
Back in 10 minutes

I had a pharmacy in Milperra. The business was failing and the lease was coming to an end, so I was looking to move and buy an existing pharmacy. The pharmacy in Minto Mall had been advertised for sale, so I came to Minto to look at it, but I got lost and found myself at the Payless Shopping Centre at Minto East. It was about 7pm and the takeaway food shop was still open. There was an empty shop next to the takeaway and it had a doctor’s surgery facing it. I asked the man in the takeaway if the doctor’s surgery was busy. He replied that it was the busiest surgery in Campbelltown. I asked him, “How would you know that?” and he replied, “Doctor Kumar had a holiday and the locum doctor said it was the busiest surgery he had ever worked in.” So I relocated my fixtures and stock from my Milperra pharmacy to the empty shop. It took six weeks and we opened for business in April 1985.

With Dr Kumar alongside, and Dr Bedi in a house up the road, I had a good prescription business. Dr Kumar and Dr Bedi were excellent caring doctors and did frequent house calls. Some of their elderly invalid patients could not come to the shops and the doctors would ring me from a patient’s house and ask me to drop some medicine into that patient on my way home. This became such a frequent event that I began to put a ‘Back in 10 minutes’ sign on the door and do the delivery on the spot. Deliveries became a major part of my business.

I saw some customers so often that they would look forward to my visit and we greeted each other with our first names. I remember two sisters, Dulcie and Beryl, who lived together. They were both invalid and couldn’t get out. One of them told me a joke one day, so I told them one back. This became a ritual and I had to keep finding new jokes. We would laugh both at the jokes and ourselves. It was a joy to visit them. Another favourite customer was Ivy. She could hardly walk, her legs were so bad. But she never complained. Her hobby was the horses and she had a phone TAB account. She studied the form and would give me some tips at times, but the racecourse is not one of my interests. Sadly they passed on years ago, along with many other of my customers of the eighties and nineties.

There was a time a foreign man came to the pharmacy. He couldn’t speak a word of English but he desperately wanted to buy something. I took him around the shop, showing him all the products and trying to communicate with him in sign language. In the end I just kept saying, “Sorry! I don’t know what you want.” But he would not leave the shop. Then I remembered that there was a phone interpreter service. I found the number and phoned. I tried to draw a rough map of the world to find out where he was from. The service was very good and within minutes a multilingual man phoned me back and he asked me to bring the man to the phone. Joy burst out all over my customer’s face when he found he was talking to someone he could understand. He was Vietnamese and his wife had fallen over and was bleeding where she had cut herself. He wanted first aid goods. I had shown him these items already, but he had not been able to recognise any of them. He had been in the shop about one hour and he left with his first aid goods and a huge smile on his face. That was a very rewarding experience.