11 out of 10

The Funniest Part Was The Blurb Used To Sell It

I don't know what incompetent algorithm at Amazon thought I would be interested in this book, but it needs to be decommissioned and erased from every hard drive known to mankind. This “humorous” book had barely enough slightly-funny moments to count on one hand - or two, if you happen to find body shaming of large people, toxic masculinity (omg the big football player cried after being abused by his fiance! wow! so funny!), mockery of mental illness, letting someone eat food a co-worker spit in, and desecrating a dead dog under command of a superior to be “funny.” I don't.

In fact, a vast majority of these stories speak of what's basically malpractice, disrespect, and sexual harrassment - the latter in a context that's fond of and amused by the perpetrator. We're supposed to find “humor” in how a man with Alzheimer's disease mistakes his reminder notes (such as “brush teeth every day”) to be aimed at his dog and ends up giving the poor pupper his medications. We're supposed to ignore that an overweight woman is being likened to a walrus. We're supposed to forgive the horribly insensitive and un-funny story about mistreating and neglecting mentally ill people which turns out to be a crappy attempt at a supernatural horror story. And we're supposed to just accept the one story about a man in a psychiatric facility who both openly carries a gun and callously talks about shooting the patients who “go crazy” - or whatever the wording was, I refuse to go back and look because once was enough.

All this book did was make me hope beyond all hope that I find the key to immortality because not only are the staff in these hospitals completely disrespectful of the patients who are living, but also of those who are dead. In one case, we're supposed to think it's karmatic justice that an elderly woman panics and thinks everyone is dead because some staffer maliciously unplugged her call button when she overused it. In another, the entire surgery team gawks at a woman's breasts when she's in for a brain surgery... and then the narrator touches the woman's brain on prompting by another doctor. And then there's the disrespect of a cadaver donated to science, trying to rename him and gawking at how his muscle tissue looks like chicken. It's just sickening. (And did I mention desecrating a dog's corpse? Because, yeah. The poor guy's beheaded to test for rabies, which... yeah, fair enough, it's necessary. But then they take the head back and reattach it to the body for a family because they refuse to just tell the family outright what testing for rabies entails.)

I can't believe I was stupid enough to trudge through this whole thing, hoping that there'd be at least one story to make it worthwhile. There wasn't. In fact, the funniest part of this book - at least, in my opinion - is the blurb used to sell it. The rest is just a mix of moderately interesting fluff and often-insensitive or offensive drivel. I'm glad it was rented on Kindle Unlimited and I didn't waste money on it, but I wish I could have my time back. Since the proceeds from the book all go to a charity, I'll just consider it as if I did volunteer work for a charity - maybe that way I'll feel better about my choice not to quit this book a couple stories into it.