Tuesday, February 21, 2006

The Worst Dialogue ever made for Nurses

In my time as an English teacher in Japan, I had accomplished very little until now.
I wrote the below dialogue as part of the listening section for a final exam of a class I taught to nursing students. It was full of the important terms we had learned over the semester such as bowel movements, acute pain and diarrhea. After writing the dialogue, I attempted to record it with a friend of mine. I played the nurse and he played himself, Mr. B. As is apparent in the recording, we said the dialogue with straight faces until Mr. B shared his diarrhea problem with me. After that, I realized how bizarre the dialogue was and we both could not say it without laughing. After over 100 tries and two hours we were finally able to act the dialogue from beginning to end without laughing. I saved all 100 of our attempts for posterity and decided to put some of our funnier blunders on the internet. Please click here to listen or press "play" below. I also challenge anyone to try to say this with a buddy and keep a straight face.

Mr. B hurries to the hospital; it is an emergency
Mr. B: Help me.
Nurse: What seems to be your problem?
Mr. B: I have a terrible pain in my stomach!
Nurse: Could you describe the pain?
Mr. B: It’s an acute pain!
Nurse: How long have you had the pain?
Mr. B: For about two hours!
Nurse: Have you taken your temperature?
Mr. B: No I haven’t.
Nurse: Ok. Let me take your temperature. It’s 38.9 degrees Celsius! You have a fever. How are your bowel habits?
Mr. B: I have diarrhea.
Nurse: I think that you might have the flu.

Note: I am current experimenting with embedding the sound files in the blog. Click play below and maybe you can listen to the above dialogue.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hilarious!!! What kind of flu were you talking about? I hope it wasn't about the bird flu!

:)

Jeff said...

Just what kind of thermometer were you using?