No, That's NOT What this Clinic is For

Well, there's a first time for everything I guess, but I never expected to come across this in my career.

My sister-in-law and myself run a small family-run clinic in London as our day job, my sister-in-law was running it on her own while the Panda and me were living in Japan, we both have degrees in medicine. Usually our customers are regulars, we're just their local clinic so they come to us when they have a problem. As such it's rare for us to see a new face there, normally at most just a family member of one of our regulars if they're staying for a while and get hurt or sick or whatever.

Our clinic is two minutes walk from a vets centre, and it's a pretty good one, it's the one me and Panda take the dog and the cat to if there's something up with them, and we would travel if we weren't happy with the sort of service we got. This morning a woman came in with a Chihuahua. One of the assistants came and got me to talk to her, since my sister-in-law was on her break and the receptionist was ill, we were short on staff. She told me she wanted a check-up, so I told her that she could give the dog to the assistant and I would take her in to give her one. She started getting distressed by this, and I told her that there was no possible way of taking animals through into the main part of the clinic because of the other patients, who may have had problems such as allergies or something else that would make an animal  potentially harmful to them. So the woman asked how she could get the check-up. It was at this point that the assistant and I realised that she had actually come in here purely to ask for a check-up for the ruddy dog.

We tried to explain to her that there was a vets only a short walk away and that she could take it there, this was a clinic for actual people. But she said that she didn't want to take her dog there, she wanted to take it to the clinic because one of her friends is apparently a regular and had told her about it. When we tried to insist that we couldn't do anything for the dog here, she actually threatened that she would sue us for refusing to service a paying customer. While I pointed out that we were perfectly within our rights the assistant made a decision that probably scarred her for life - she went to get my sister-in-law to sort out the problem.

My sister-in-law has a crazy short temper, and she really flares up when we interrupt something she deems important - such as talking to my brother on the phone while on her break about something she thinks we could've handled on her own. She came and got rid of the customer (I don't have a clue how, I fled as soon as she walked into the room), but then the assistant and me ended up getting a half hour long lecture about not interrupting her about menial things that we can sort out ourselves and aren't worthy of her attention.

So, all in all, a pretty hectic and weird morning.